


a sacrifice to the old gods

by ArsenicInYourPudding



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Gen, M/M, kaldur almost dies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-04-10 05:55:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 34,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4379816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArsenicInYourPudding/pseuds/ArsenicInYourPudding
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kaldur is perfectly fine with dying for the cause. It's what happens after that worries him. </p>
<p>Or, Kaldur is injured, delirious, and convinced that the gods are judging him for his crimes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, this needs some explanation. 
> 
> So, a few weeks ago, I was chatting with shadesninde and Down To The River from O Brother Where Art Thou? came up on shuffle, and I had this knee-jerk visual within three notes of the beginning with Kaldur bleeding out in a dimly lit metal hallway which was startling enough for me to share, and from there it sort of blossomed into a sort of what-if where Kaldur stole a Manta sub and left on his own to disable a weapon, and was seriously injured in doing so. What follows here is the result.

The emergency lights offered just enough light to see edges and corners, bathing the interior of the sub in a dim, eerie red wash. For a minute, Kaldur thought of all the nightmares he’d had of drowning, the blood of the innocents he’d killed rising around him and clogging his gills, filling his lungs, but the oxygen in the sub would hold out for another ten minutes, and the only blood around him was his own.

He’d stripped of the armor some time ago to better crawl through the engine of the sub to find the tracking device, leaving himself in only an undershirt and leggings, but he still felt heavy, like the plates of steel and plastic were still dragging him down, hanging on his shoulders like lead weights. He stumbled into the wall, his knees buckling under him, and exhausted, he slid to the floor.

The goal had been the escape hatch at the back of the sub, but it seemed he was as crippled as his sub. The hasty field dressing he’d applied to the wound on his side was saturated with blood, and the sub’s infirmary was too far away to get any more supplies. Kaldur sighed and leaned back into the cold, damp metal - in truth, he wasn’t sure he’d really expected to get out anyway, but that no longer mattered. His job was done, or at least the part no one else could do, and whatever remained could be the League’s responsibility. He had made his peace with dying long before he boarded the Manta Flyer for the first time, and even now, so close to the end of their mission, he felt no frustration or grief about not getting to see the outcome. His borrowed time had likely simply run out.

Kaldur couldn’t feel the wound anymore, just a dull, heavy numbness in his limbs and an endless, aching exhaustion everywhere else. He wanted to sleep. He  _ could _ sleep, now that his task was finished and his cover was well and truly discarded.  _ Maybe I have earned this _ , he thought, allowing him the selfishness. He wasn’t needed anymore. He could rest.

Around the not unpleasant ringing in his ears, he heard something that might have been the scraping groan of metal pulled asunder, but he couldn’t find the energy to care. He was so tired. It had been so long since he’d truly slept. He blinked heavily at the opposite wall, eyelids drifting lazily.

He might have heard a series of quick, pounding thuds - footsteps, approaching down the corridor. His only response was to slump closer to the floor.

Kaldur could hear words - words he knew, he recognized distantly, a voice familiar to him. His name, perhaps, although he couldn’t be sure of anything except the cold and the dim light and the ache in his side and his own desperate need for sleep. “Kaldur,” he heard it again, although it sounded like it was miles away. His eyes slipped closed.

The footsteps got close enough to rattle the grate that covered the walkway an inch off the floor. Kaldur cracked his eyes open to find someone walking toward him. His vision was blurry, and he couldn’t see their face in the dim light, but the outline of their shoulders was broad, and they hurried down the hall toward him. “Kaldur,” they said urgently, and Kaldur wanted to hold up a hand to stop them.  _ No, it’s alright, _ he wanted to say,  _ if you wait just a minute, I’m on my way out, no need to trouble yourself.  _ But he was so tired that even his voice wouldn’t work, and his eyes closed again. Hands on his shoulders forced them open, and he found a familiar face inches from his. He knew this face, but the name danced just out of reach. Oh well.

“ Kaldur’ahm, stay with me, do  _ not _ \--”

The rest faded away into the tide of sleep.

 

* * *

It was a long swim to Shayeris, and even longer with Kaldur’s dead weight draped over his back, but Garth managed to slip in between the houses just as the first rays of light were filtering down from the surface. Sha’lain’a’s house was a cheerful shell pink nestled among the blue-grey hills, and Garth made a beeline for the front door. “Sha’lain’a,” he called.

Sha’lain’a appeared in the doorway, her hair floating around her like silk. “Garth,” she said, eyebrows arching up. Her eyes landed on the motionless form over his shoulders, and she stilled, whispering something he couldn’t hear under her breath. “Kaldur,” she asked louder, reaching out hesitantly toward him.

“He lives, but he has lost a lot of blood,” Garth told her anxiously, and that seemed to snap her out of her wide-eyed trance. She reached for him and guided him inside, checking outside for witnesses before pushing him toward the back of the house. “I didn’t know where else to take him.”

“He is safe here,” Sha’lain’a promised solemnly, leading him back down the hallway. She pushed Garth into a room he recognized as Kaldur’s and gestured to the bed before disappearing.

Garth pulled Kaldur off his shoulder and let him slump to the bed, arranging him on his back. He’d packed another hasty layer of bandages against the bloodsoaked ones clinging to Kaldur’s side before he left the sub, but even those were beginning to stain red. His pulse was weak and erratic under Garth’s fingertips, and a surge of anger burned through the icy, stagnant fear. He hadn’t dragged Kaldur out of that sub and across miles of the ocean floor just to watch him die. “You  _ will _ recover,” he hissed desperately at his friend’s unconscious form, taking his hand and squeezing it hard in the hopes that the pain would somehow bring him around. “You will not die today, not after all you have done.” He wasn't sure if death would be a reward or a punishment, but either way, he would fight tooth and nail to deny it Kaldur.

He didn’t respond, not so much as a flinch or a flutter of his eyelids to indicate that maybe, some part of him had heard and understood. The fear closed in again, and the water around him tasted like the faint, unmistakable tang of blood.

Sha’lain’a returned, trailing her husband behind her. “Kaldur,” he murmured, looking equal parts shell-shocked and relieved, and with an unexpected effort, Garth wrenched himself away from his friend’s side to let Calvin have his place. “What  _ happened _ to him?”

“I don’t know,” Garth admitted, lingering near the bedroom wall. “His...actions, of late, seem to have been motivated by something...far larger than simply gaining his father’s approval, but I fear I only know bits and pieces. I found him in a stolen Manta sub by the drop-off, and he lost consciousness soon after I arrived.” Garth hesitated, watching Sha’lain’a’s hands move over the bandages on Kaldur’s side. “I... I didn’t know where else to bring him.”

Calvin turned to him and grabbed his arm, dragging him away from the wall and into a rough, tight hug. “You did the right thing,” he said in Garth’s ear, and some of the worry bled out of Garth’s tense shoulders. He slumped into the hug and returned it, every fiber of his being exhausted. Calvin’s hand curled around the back of Garth’s head, holding it against his shoulder. “You saved my boy, Garth. You saved him.”

Sha’lain’a spoke from across the room, her voice soft and grave. “I fear he is not safe yet,” she cautioned, and the two men across the bed from her looked over, worry spiking. She met their eyes, her own gaze hard with determination. “Garth, come help me. Calvin, I need supplies.”

Calvin nodded seriously and left the room, leaving Garth to hesitantly approach the bed. Sha’lain’a took one wrist and guided his hands to the clean cloth she’d pressed over the bandages. “Keep pressure on the wound,” she coached, her voice soft with worry. He did as she asked, hands trembling, and after a minute she folded her own over his. “Thank you,” she whispered, when he looked up to find a sad, grateful smile. “Thank you for bringing him back to me.”

* * *

“Still no sign, my king,” the scout leader said solemnly, and Orin turned away. Gods, how he was learning to hate those words.

It had been days since the thwarted invasion, since Nightwing had dragged Artemis -  _ Artemis _ , everyone was still reeling from that one - off the Manta Flyer with a broken leg and a concussion and a tense, furious tale about Kaldur going to disable Black Manta’s main weapon alone. “You  _ find him _ , jackass,” she’d demanded of Nightwing, gripping the front of his uniform and hauling him down to her level on the bed in the Watchtower’s medical bay. “You left him to die once already, I won’t let you make the same  _ mistake  _ twice.”

The sub Kaldur had taken had last been seen heading east into open water, from where the Manta Flyer was floating off the coast of Cuba. Orin had ordered search parties start there and fan out, but it had been four days, and things were looking increasingly grim. It was a big ocean, it wouldn’t be hard for one rogue sub to get lost where even he couldn’t follow. Orin sighed, staring down at the map stretched out in front of him. He couldn’t lose Kaldur, not a second time. Not without a chance to make amends.

“My king,” another voice said from the doorway to the war room. Orin looked up and found another scout, younger than the first, gripping a spear with white knuckles.

“Yes,” Orin said impatiently, waving him forward.

He looked around for a second, apparently awed by the palace decor, before his eyes settled on Orin again. “We-- We believe we’ve found it, sir.”

Hope surged through Orin’s veins. He rounded the map table and grabbed the young man’s arm. “Where,” he demanded, leading him from the room.

“Several hours outside Shayeris, sitting at the edge of the chasm. We haven’t entered yet, it appears to be powered by radioactive material. We have a team running full decontamination before we attempt entry, so it will be an hour or so until we can say if Kaldur’ahm is on board the vessel.”

Impatience warred with common sense. “That is logical,” he said finally. “Can you show me to the site?”

“My king?”

Orin turned to the scout. “It was a simple question,” he said, his voice low and displeased.

The scout flinched. “Of-- Of course, my king. But the site is dangerous and Kaldur’ahm is still at large, wouldn’t it be more prudent to let the soldiers take the risk, and report back?”

It was a good question, and one that part of Orin himself had wondered at. If Kaldur truly had gone over to Black Manta, even with Artemis and Nightwing vouching that he hadn’t, would it be worth putting Atlantis in danger of losing its leader so he could bring one boy home?

“I will be there,” he said, with the same conviction he had used to publically declare Kaldur’ahm a terrorist and a traitor to the crown. “When he is found, I will be there to meet him.”

_ I owe him at least that much,  _ he thought.

 


	2. Chapter 2

M’gann hadn’t left her side in two days. Artemis would’ve expected this kind of behavior from maybe Ollie, or Zatanna on the outside, but M’gann had _known_ she wasn’t dead, after she’d brain-blasted Kaldur into psychic rubble and then was kidnapped to fix the mess she’d created. She’d been just about the only non-Nightwing team member to not be totally blindsided by Artemis’s return from the grave, so to speak, but here she was, hanging around like she was afraid if she took her eyes off Artemis for a second, she’d disappear again.

“M’gann,” Artemis tried again, “Wally’s coming by at six, I’ll be okay by myself for a few hours. Go eat something, sleep in your own bed. I mean, I’m in medical on the Watchtower, it’s not like I’m going anywhere.” If she could get a couple hours where no one was literally watching her every move, maybe she could get a nap in herself.

“Hmm? Oh, I’m fine.”

Artemis tried not to let her frustration show on her face, which was pointless because M’gann would probably feel it anyway. She’d been feeling the subtle pressure of M’gann checking her emotions like the nurse checked her physical bandages for hours - no mindlink, no poking through her thoughts, just a constant, careful, hesitant monitoring of her emotional state. It had been comforting when she woke up from sedation. Now, it was just exhausting.

“I’m making a genuine effort to not be rude here,” she sighed, “but seriously. Unless Dick listed me as a flight risk and then forgot to tell me, which I honestly wouldn’t put past him but I doubt it, is there some sort of underlying reason why you won’t let me just take a nap in peace?”

M’gann flinched, and Artemis winced at it. Ah, there it was, the stinging guilt she felt whenever she hurt M’gann’s feelings. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly, wringing her hands in her lap. “I just... No one else understands.”

“Understands what?” So far, M’gann had only talked about team dynamics and the freshmen and her newly rekindled relationship with Connor, topics on which Artemis’s ability to focus had honestly run the spectrum from engaged and interested to nodding off entirely. It wasn’t like they’d been talking about anything particularly serious or heartfelt since Artemis woke up.

Her shoulders hunched, and she wrapped her arms around her waist. “They still haven’t found Kaldur yet,” she whispered.

“Yeah, M’gann, I know,” Artemis sighed. She really wasn’t trying to be rude, but she hated the reminder that she’d let him go off alone. If he died, that was, in some measure, on her.

“No,” M’gann insisted, and when she looked up at Artemis, her eyes were wet. “What if... What if he _can’t_ come home? What if it’s _my_ fault, and I didn’t fix something, and he’s... He’s out there lost, or confused, or convinced that-- That--”

The fear that M’gann couldn’t put words to leeched into Artemis’s mind anyway. “That his only option is to kill himself,” she finished, her voice solemn and quiet.

M’gann choked on a sob and curled in on herself, nodding. “You-- You _saw_ how his mind looked,” she sniffed, and when she raised her head to look at Artemis, her eyes were huge and pathetic, tears streaming down her face. “What if-- What if he never intended to come back, after he stole the sub?”

“He wouldn’t dare,” Artemis assured her. “He knows what that would do to us.”

“But what if he _doesn’t_ ,” M’gann insisted. “What if he can’t remember that we love him and want him to come home, and that’s my fault?”

The pervasive guilt and anxiety washed over Artemis, and she sighed. “Oh, M’gann,” she murmured, holding her arms out. M’gann nearly lunged from the chair to the bed, settling beside her and hugging her tightly, her face pushed into Artemis’s shoulder. “Shh, it’s not your fault. This isn’t your fault, M’gann, know that.” She bit her lip - this probably wasn’t the right thing to say, but odds were that M’gann could hear her thinking it, so she might as well spit it out. “Honestly, I think if he’s forgotten his place with us, it happened long before he met you in that hallway. You can’t take credit for that.”

M’gann sobbed and clung tighter. Artemis stroked her hair and did her best impression of her own mother, feeling M’gann’s fingers clenched tightly in the fabric of her oversized t-shirt against her back. “Shhhh, it’s okay, shh.”

A knock on the door got lost in M’gann’s wailing, but the flicker of movement as it opened caught her eye. Black Canary took a step into the room, looking solemn and mournful, and Artemis’s heart sank.

“You girls okay in here,” she asked carefully, moving to sit on the end of the bed by Artemis’s cast.

“They found him, didn’t they,” Artemis asked, ignoring the question.

Black Canary sighed and scrubbed a hand over her face. “Not so much,” she said, sounding more exhausted than Artemis had ever figured Black Canary could be. “They found the sub, sitting on the ocean floor in front of a massive drop off. One of the inner hatches was ripped open, and they found a large pool of blood in one of the hallways, but there was no one on board, and it doesn’t look like they left of their own free will.”

“Wh-- What does that mean,” M’gann hiccupped, still clinging to Artemis’s waist. Absently, Artemis pulled her fingers through M’gann’s hair.

“It means that the likelihood of finding Kaldur alive just got very, very small,” she answered for Black Canary. “Right?”

She pressed her lips together and bowed her head. “Orin’s called off all but two of the search parties,” she confirmed quietly after a minute. “The goal has been shifted from rescue to...recovery.”

M’gann turned her face back into Artemis’s shoulder and wailed, her grief echoing through the room. Artemis just sat there, staring at Black Canary, stunned beyond any display of emotion. The older woman reached for the hand that wasn’t stroking M’gann’s back on autopilot. “If you need me, I’m here,” she said, giving Artemis’s hand a squeeze. “You know how to get a hold of me.”

Artemis took a deep breath. “Would you-- Can you stay, for a minute,” she asked, her voice hatefully unsteady.

“Of course,” she said gently, “as long as you need.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you may have noticed, Wally isn't dead. No alien doomsday devices = no speed death. You're welcome, Wally fans.


	3. Chapter 3

There was peace when Kaldur’s eyes fluttered open again.

Instead of the cold, bloody light in the sub corridor, he found himself looking at familiar walls - his old bedroom, his mother’s home, he realized, although everything seemed tinged with a faint gold glow. He’d never been sure of the concept of an afterlife or eternal rewards or damnation - he’d thought briefly about the possibilities of a hell, the notion of being flung into dark, cold, endless water, unable to swim upwards, just sinking endlessly through an ocean cavern - but apparently whatever good he’d done in his life had balanced out the atrocities he’d committed. Of all possible final rewards, going home to the peace of Shayeris was alright with him.

“Kaldur,” a woman’s voice said next to him, and he turned his head. He must not be used to moving his body, he thought, so even the simple motion took some effort to coordinate.

He couldn’t recognize the woman immediately. She bore a striking, heartwrenching resemblance to his mother, her hair floating around her like gold silk and her eyes shining and warm, but he couldn’t be sure that it _was_ her, and then it occurred to him - perhaps this was not his final reward. Perhaps this was simply where he is to answer for his sins. It’d be just like the gods to take the form of all that he has betrayed, to place him in a room he will never again know, to ensure that his interrogation is only the beginning of his punishment.

“My son,” the goddess who is not his mother said gently, taking his hand. “What has happened to you?”

He opened his mouth, but his voice refused to come out. He tried to sit up - one shouldn’t lounge in the presence of the divine, that would just be disrespectful, wouldn’t it? - and his whole body felt heavy, like it would take Superman to lift him from the bed. The goddess set her hand on his chest. “Be still,” she whispered. “You have been wounded, Kaldur, do not make it worse.”

He wanted to laugh, or to argue. He was only capable of making things worse, and his interrogation by the gods seemed no exception. But he bit his tongue and breathed, and worked up the strength to whisper, “Apologies.”

The goddess’s eyes filled with tears, and she leaned over him. “No, no,” she shushed him, stroking a hand over his face. “Don’t be sorry, I am only happy that you are home.”

Perhaps this was his reward after all, then? “Why,” he rasped, his voice barely a whisper in the quiet of the room.

“Why? Because you are my _son_ ,” she whispered back, her fingers gentle and cool against his skin. A pang of guilt stabbed through him, searing and painful, and at once, Kaldur understood what the gods wanted of him. They wanted him to see what he had forsaken, what he had betrayed, before he was punished for it. There was no balance scale that might somehow tip in his favor, no possibility of mercy as a reward for the years he spent as a hero. This was merely the first part of his punishment.

Exhaustion and sorrow swept over him, and he grasped at the goddess’s hand. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, his voice broken and full of grief even to his own ears. _Let my mother know that I am sorry_ , he thought, begging even though he lacked the strength to speak. _Let my mother know I regret how my life played out. She deserved better as a son._

The goddess was saying something, but he found himself drifting away from her. He could no longer feel her hand in his, or the bed beneath him. All he could feel was the rushing of the tide, and his own pressing guilt.

* * *

Garth swam the length of the kitchen again, from the spot in the doorway where he could see down the hall and into Kaldur’s room, to the kitchen window, shuttered tight against eavesdropping neighbors. Calvin sat at the kitchen table, watching Garth swim in circles before him. He cleared his throat quietly, the first sound either had made in close to an hour, and Garth startled. “When we heard that Kaldur had joined Black Manta,” he said, dropping his gaze to the tabletop, “Sha’lain’a and I both had such a hard time believing him capable of it. I was only just starting to reconcile myself to the idea, and now...”

Garth folded his arms, suddenly unsure of what to do with himself. Shame crept over him. “...I fear I was too eager to believe the worst of him,” he confessed quietly. “Once I knew who his father was... I should have known better.”

Calvin sighed. “Apparently it’s a big club.” He shook his head. “What could he _possibly_ have wanted with Manta?”

“I don’t know,” Garth said, shrugging and sinking into a chair across the table. “I didn’t exactly stick around to learn the details, once I heard that Kaldur had left on his own.”

“And we should be glad you did, or Kaldur might not have made it.”

Garth squirmed a little, unable to accept the man’s praise without a fresh wave of guilt. “I needed to hear Kaldur speak the truth, if I am to believe he isn’t the murderer we thought him to be.”

A faint ripple through the water signaled Sha’lain’a’s arrival. “Noble, and generous,” she said with tired approval. “He sleeps,” she said to her husband’s unspoken question. “He is...delirious. Agitated. He needs a healer.”

Calvin frowned. “We can’t.”

“I _know_ that.” She sighed. “And we cannot take him elsewhere, either. He is hanging on by a thread as it stands.”

“Nevermind getting him out of here unseen,” Calvin agreed unhappily. “No good options.”

“Seems to be going around lately,” Garth muttered.

A dark look crossed Sha’lain’a’s face. “If this was the king’s idea, I _swear_ \--”

“Sha’lain’a,” Calvin warned.

“Sovereign or not, I trusted him with my son’s _life_ , and look how he handled that,” she argued, gesturing toward Kaldur’s room. “Is not a king a man? Should he not be expected to answer for his mistakes like one?”

“Kaldur chose to become Aqualad,” he reminded her. “He chose to take that risk himself.”

“He was a _child!_ He had no business being sent on this _fool’s errand_ at all!”

“King Orin has a responsibility to Atlantis.”

“And what of his responsibility to Kaldur,” she insisted.

Calvin stood. “We don’t _know_ what happened,” he said, his voice measured and quiet and hard as stone. “The only person who knows what happened is Kaldur himself, and until he wakes up again, any conclusion we come to is only speculation.” Without another word, he vanished in the direction of Kaldur’s room.

Garth and Sha’lain’a both watched him leave, and she slumped in her chair, pressing her hands to her face. Garth stretched a hand out across the table, and she took it, giving his fingers a gentle squeeze. “I fear for him,” she confessed quietly.

“As do I,” Garth said, “but Calvin is right. Kaldur is the only one who knows the truth of what happened.”

Sha’lain’a sighed. “I know,” she whispered. “And that is what frightens me.”

* * *

Someone was humming softly when Kaldur drifted back toward consciousness again. The sound drifted over Kaldur and for a moment, all he could think of was laying in the water on the beach outside the Cave - on the ocean floor, the tide was like a gentle, steady breeze, so familiar it was almost impossible to feel, but up just under the surface, between the water and the sand and the sky, it was like being rocked to sleep.

Kaldur opened his eyes, and found he was still in his own bedroom. He could remember only a goddess questioning him, and before that, the thought of drowning in blood, and before that, a piercing, searing pain. Everything else was like hunting through a seaweed forest - stray too far from what you knew, and you could end up lost and disoriented for days.

The humming was coming from his left, and it trailed off as he turned his head. “Kaldur?” The voice sounded like his fath-- Calvin’s voice. Calvin wasn’t his father. That much he could remember clearly. Idly, he wondered if that had any bearing on his fate, that he was the spawn of Black Manta. It might, the universe tended to be unfair like that. He hadn’t asked for any of this, but that didn't mean anything.

“It’s alright, it’s just me,” Calvin said. He set something Kaldur couldn’t see on the floor by his chair and sat forward. He reached out and his hands hovered for a moment before retreating again. “Oh, my boy,” he sighed.

If he’d had any more control over his body, Kaldur would’ve winced. Of course he would be the next person the gods would want him to know he’d failed. Wasn’t part of the point of growing up to succeed where your parents had failed? He’d fallen right back into same trap Calvin had, despite Calvin’s warnings.

A large, steady hand stroked over his face. “Why would you do this to yourself,” Calvin murmured. “What could Manta have possibly held for you?”

Kaldur turned his head, and found the simple motion had sapped his energy to explain. _I needed to stop him,_ he wanted desperately to tell him. _I was the only one he would let close enough to take him down. I had to keep everyone safe_.

But had he actually succeeded? Manta was crippled, definitely, but he had no way of knowing if the League had actually captured him, and with all the destruction he’d caused to get into his father’s good graces, had he really done anything more than just make himself a willing participant, deluding himself into thinking he was acting for the greater good? Was anyone safer because of what he’d done? How many people might have lived if he’d stayed away from his father altogether?

His agitation must have shown through his exhaustion, because the man who wasn’t Calvin shushed him and settled a hand over Kaldur’s eyes. “Rest,” he urged gently. “Regain your strength. This conversation isn’t going anywhere.”

Kaldur’s hand twitched, flopping from the bed to his abdomen. It was the most movement he’d been able to manage, spurred on by a suddenly frantic desire to stay and explain himself. Maybe, if the gods knew his intentions, his sentence would be lighter. Deserved or not, eternal torment wasn’t a pleasant notion to be faced with.

But the bidding of a god was absolute, and regardless of his wishes, Kaldur felt himself drifting again.


	4. Chapter 4

Orin couldn’t put this off any longer. He’d done everything possible for a week to do so - assembly meetings, council meetings, audiences, he’d even managed to wrangle Watchtower monitor duty for a shift. But Mera had cornered him when he came home, taken both of his hands in hers, and told him solemnly, “You _must_ tell his mother. You owe her that,” and, well. There are some authorities to which even a king must bow.

He’d rehearsed a thousand different speeches on the way to Shayeris, and discarded every one - _I grieve for your loss_ sounded insincere. _His bravery was an inspiration_ sounded contrived. _Your son died a hero_ was cold comfort, at best. His heart ached for his own loss - as poorly as he’d shown it recently, he’d come to think of Kaldur as a son, or at least something close. His own child would never know his protege, nor would Kaldur ever see the heir to the throne grow. As selfish as it was, he wasn’t sure he could console Sha’lain’a’s grief, so laden with his own.

All too quickly, her house seemed to loom before him. Orin paused at the base of the small hill, squaring his shoulders like he was about to address the full assembly, instead of one woman in her own home. As if summoned, she appeared in the doorway just before he made it all the way up the hill, staring impassively as he came to a stop before her. “Sha’lain’a,” he began.

Her face was blank, and she folded her arms across her waist. “My king,” she said without inflection, not bothering to lower her head or avoid eye contact, as was the custom when speaking to royalty. “You have news of my son?”

For all his preparation for this moment, the words seemed to hit him like a punch to the chest. His shoulders dropped, and he looked away from her gaze. “May I come in,” he asked quietly.

She tensed for a second, hesitating. At last she nodded, standing aside to let him pass. “Is Calvin here,” Orin asked, letting her lead the way into a small sitting area. Every window he could see was shuttered tightly - had there been harassment, he wondered, feeling faintly sickened by the notion. He should have offered to post a guard, once news of Kaldur’s change in loyalty reached Shayeris. His list of oversights just kept growing, it seemed.

“No, he isn’t,” she said, and offered no further information. He waited for her to settle in a chair by the window before taking a seat himself.

She watched him intently as he gathered his thoughts, wringing his hands in his lap. “There is...no easy way to say this,” he said apologetically, meeting her gaze again. “But your son... Kaldur undertook a dangerous mission, going undercover in Black Manta’s forces.” Her eyebrows lifted toward her hairline, and her hand lifted like she was going to press it to her mouth, but it drifted to a stop halfway and ended up held against her collarbone. “Had I known what he intended to do, believe me, I would have counseled him against it, but he spoke of his plan to no one except three members of his team on the surface. As it stands, he managed to disrupt a large scale invasion that would have certainly destroyed Atlantis, if not the surface world as well.” Orin took a steadying breath - the easy part, telling a mother that her son _was_ a hero, was over. Now he had to deal with telling that same mother that her son had _died_ as one. “At the end of his mission, he...left on his own, to disable Black Manta’s most crucial weapon. We recovered the sub he was on, but there was evidence that he was grievously wounded, and that he did not leave on his own.”

Sha’lain’a stared at him. “You do not know where my son is,” she asked, her voice faint.

“We are doing everything we can to find him,” Orin promised quietly, “to bring him home for a proper burial. My heart grieves with you, truly.” She slumped back in her chair, staring blankly over his shoulder at the wall behind him. _Shock_ , he thought, and waited uncomfortably for grief or anger to set in.

Instead, her eyes snapped to someone lingering in the hallway. Orin turned, and found Garth twisting his hands anxiously, looking between the two of them like he couldn’t decide which he was more afraid of. “What is it,” she asked, sitting forward anxiously.

Garth’s eyes flickered to Orin one more time before settling on her. “He is delirious,” he said, more scared than Orin could ever remember him sounding. “I fear he may hurt himself further.”

Sha’lain’a stood and hurried around him down the hall without further prompting, leaving Orin and Garth alone in the room. “Garth,” Orin said carefully. “This is...a long way from the Conservatory.”

“I...” Garth managed, stalling out and shrinking in on himself like the accomplished sorcerer he’d become had been stripped away, leaving only the boy of fourteen he’d been when Orin had first met him. Orin stood, and in an instant his expression shifted from terror to determination, and he drew himself up to his full height, planting himself in between his king and wherever Sha’lain’a had gone. “Kaldur is my best friend, Annex. His mother needs my support in this difficult time.”

_Kaldur_ is _my best friend_ , Orin repeated to himself, the subtle clues fitting together in his mind like shards of a mosaic. Was it possible? “Son,” he said, advancing slowly on Garth, “who is back there?”

Garth said nothing, jaw clenched stubbornly. Orin stopped in front of him, practically nose to nose - he remembered a time when Garth would have had to crane his neck upward to look him in the eye. “Are you and Sha’lain’a harboring Kaldur’ahm,” he asked quietly. 

“He was dying,” Garth said finally, his stony silence giving way to an open, plaintive expression. “What would you have had me do, Annex? Leave him to bleed out alone? Make him a target when he is unable to defend himself? There _was_ nowhere else to bring him. Kaldur _is_ my best friend, I wouldn’t leave him to die.”

_You should have told me_ , Orin wanted to say, but even his ego could recognize the wisdom in Garth’s choice to bring him home in secrecy. His shoulders dropped, and he took a deep breath. “How is he,” he asked instead, glancing past Garth down the hallway.

Garth folded his arms around himself. “Not well,” he said, voice hardly more than a whisper. “If anything, he grows steadily worse. We may yet lose him after all.”

The news drove the breath from Orin’s lungs, the small hope that Kaldur was alive doused like a guttering candle. “I would see him,” he said after a moment’s silence. Garth’s eyes snapped to his, startled and more than a little afraid. “To see his condition with my own eyes,” he added, trying to keep his voice even. The implication that he would still seek to apprehend Kaldur after having just being told that he was dying was itself a stinging blow.

Garth pressed his lips together in protective disapproval, but nodded and turned to lead the way down the hall. He slipped through a doorway halfway to the back of the house and Orin followed, pausing just inside the room.

Kaldur was arrayed on the bed, bandages packed tightly around what Orin presumed to be a serious wound on his right side. Sha’lain’a perched next to him, one forearm pressed flat against his chest in an effort to hold him still without causing further damage. “Kaldur, my son,” she whispered, stroking her free hand over his forehead. “Shhh, all will be well. Nothing can hurt you here.”

He thrashed weakly under her arm, eyelids flickering. He muttered something that may have been _damnation_ or _punishment_ , restless and afraid, and Orin’s heart seized at the sound. “What can I do,” he asked, looking between Sha’lain’a and Garth.

They exchanged a look of their own. “I don’t know,” Garth said, folding his arms again. “He was barely awake when he heard your voice down the hall, and then it was like he had been thrown into a nightmare. I couldn’t get him to calm down.” He lifted his head and met Orin’s eye with the same expression he always had before saying something probably wise and definitely disrespectful. “Perhaps--”

“Annex,” Kaldur moaned, and all eyes darted back to him.


	5. Chapter 5

Of all the people he had betrayed, Kaldur feared King Orin the most. For practical reasons, yes, but also because the man had truly given him his first chance to be something more than himself - to be a leader, as difficult a burden as that was to bear; to make a difference not just on the surface but at home in Atlantis, as well. He had taken a chance with Kaldur, offering to make him his protege, and how did Kaldur repay him?

By bombing his home, by attacking the League Aquaman had sworn himself to, the team comprised of the proteges of his friends. By taking the name he had been given and destroying it, like it was worth nothing. So why wouldn’t the king of the gods take the form of his mortal counterpart to give his judgement?

He had heard the voice of the king outside the room, consulting with the goddess who was not his mother. He couldn’t understand the words - were they deliberating on his sentence? Was this the end? The thought terrified him. Would he be given a chance to speak in his own defence? Was he a coward for even wanting such a thing, to argue with Neptune himself about his fate?

The god who had been sitting with him - in the form of his furious best friend, almost enough for him to beg for whatever eternal punishment they could hand down to him - left abruptly, leaving him alone and afraid and still too weak to move. The goddess returned just as suddenly as the other god had left, perching on the edge of his bed and smoothing her hands over his face. “Kaldur, my son,” she whispered to him, pressing one arm against his chest to restrain him. “Shhh, all will be well. Nothing can hurt you here.” Did the gods lie to comfort mortals, he wondered frantically. He could _hear_ Neptune speaking to the god who wasn’t Garth outside what wasn’t his childhood bedroom, demanding to see him. Nothing would be well ever again, what was the point in lying to him about it?

Kaldur turned his head as the god who wasn’t Garth swam through the doorway and took up residence in the far corner of the room, arms crossed impassively. Neptune, cloaked in the form of King Orin, filled the doorway with his imposing bulk. “My king, please, before you judge me worthy of punishment,” he begged, his voice garbled even to his own ears.

The gods shared a look. He knew it was disrespectful, to challenge a divine ruling, but terror had become far more important than any ingrained respect for the gods he may once have had. Neptune said something his panic rendered him incapable of understanding, and the god who wasn’t Garth answered him, equally indecipherable.

“Annex,” he moaned, drawing the attention onto himself again.

Neptune made his way around the end of the bed and took up a perch mirroring the goddess on his other side. “I am here, Kaldur’ahm,” he said quietly.

Kaldur made a brave attempt at sitting up, and pain coursed through his chest. He had thought he was simply too weak to move - were the gods keeping him restrained? Neptune braced a hand on his chest and pushed him back. “Be still, Kaldur,” he ordered, and any strength left in Kaldur’s limbs fled in an instant at the words.

“Apologies, my king,” Kaldur managed. “I have dishonored you, but not without cause.”

Neptune looked puzzled, and Kaldur seized his chance to continue. Perhaps he was pressing his luck, but he was already dead, what did it matter anymore? “Black Manta had to be stopped, I was the only one who--”

The god’s face cleared, a profound sadness replacing the confusion. “Oh, Kaldur,” he sighed, taking one of Kaldur’s hands in his own. “There is no need to explain, I already know.”

Panic gripped him again. If the gods already knew of Kaldur’s intentions, was there nothing he could say to beg a lighter sentence? He had been judged and found wanting anyway? “Annex,” he begged again, and Neptune shushed him gently.

“My son,” he said, his voice almost... Tender? Kaldur stalled, trying to process the lack of expected divine fury. “Your sacrifice was noble. Dangerous and reckless beyond words, but also incredibly brave. Artemis and Nightwing both told us of what you did to stop the invasion.” Neptune’s free hand came up and hesitated before resting over Kaldur’s heart. “All is forgiven, Kaldur, if you will forgive me.”

Dumbfounded, Kaldur stared at Neptune. What could possibly compel the king of the gods to beg forgiveness, let alone from _him_?

Neptune shared a glance with the goddess who wasn’t his mother, and looked back down at him. “I fear I was too eager to believe the worst of you,” Neptune admitted carefully, “and I have betrayed your trust in me as a mentor. You should not have felt you needed to undertake this alone - at the very least, you should have been able to seek my counsel. I have taken you for granted, and for that I beg your forgiveness.”

Kaldur floundered, words fleeing in the face of his confusion. “...What,” was the best he could come up with, his voice strangled with exhaustion and pain.

Neptune shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now,” he sighed, stroking a hand over Kaldur’s forehead in much the same way the goddess had done earlier. “Rest, Kaldur’ahm. You have more than earned it.”

That was it? Was his sentence being delayed? Were the gods even planning to punish him at all? Kaldur’s head spun, and he slumped back against the bed, unable to process.

“Rest, my love,” the goddess urged quietly, bending to kiss his forehead. “All will be well.” 

As he drifted away, Kaldur wondered if she actually _was_ lying.

* * *

Orin watched Kaldur slump back into unconsciousness with a hollow, disoriented sort of worry, before turning to Garth. “Perhaps we must... compare notes.”

Sha’lain’a pressed her lips together and stood. “Out,” she said decisively, and Orin’s head snapped up. She held his gaze evenly. “Kaldur needs his rest. We can talk elsewhere.”

Shoulders slumping with something like relief, Orin followed her out of the room, trailing Garth behind them. The three of them ended up seated at the kitchen table, Sha’lain’a checking the shutters on the kitchen window before sinking into her own chair. She gave Garth a quiet, prompting nod, and he dropped his gaze to the table, wringing his hands on its surface. “Start from the beginning,” she urged, setting a hand on top of his.

“I was with the team when Nightwing led the rescue mission,” he began. “It was selfish, but... I wanted answers. I felt Kaldur owed me the truth, and I didn’t trust that Nightwing or the other surface dwellers wouldn’t lie to excuse what he had done. And after all this time... I don’t believe that he would lie to me. He never has before.” He took a steadying breath and risked a quick glance at Orin before dropping his gaze again. “So I went with them, as Tempest. When we found Artemis, she told him - Nightwing - that Kaldur had taken a sub on his own to disable a...a weapon, of some kind.” He sighed, his expression pained. “I was furious, that everyone seemed so convinced that he wouldn’t betray them the same way he betrayed _us_. That he might escape justice because the surface dwellers were all so naive. So I followed him. I tracked him to the chasm, and watched until the sub set down on the ocean floor and just...waited. There was no activity inside, as far as I could see. I grew impatient, waiting for him to leave.”

“It’s good that you did,” Orin told him. “A few more minutes, and he might have bled out entirely.”

Garth’s shoulders hunched. “Well,” he said quietly, and fell silent.

Sha’lain’a held his hands in both of hers across the table. “Kaldur lives, because of you,” she insisted. “We are both in your debt, Garth.”

“He may yet die, though,” Garth said, lifting his eyes to hers, his expression grieving and terrified. “And all this will have been for nothing!”

Orin set a hand on Garth’s shoulder. “We will care for him,” he promised solemnly.

“He cannot be moved,” Sha’lain’a said. “He is very fragile, I fear what damage the journey to Poseidonis would cause.”

“Then I will send a healer here.” Orin met her eye and hoped his expression conveyed just how serious he was. “If the wound is as bad as you say, he needs medical attention. The palace healers will be discrete, you have my word.” Sha’lain’a pursed her lips. “Please,” he said quietly, “let me do what I can to make this right.”

She sighed, and nodded finally. “No more than two,” she said, “I won’t have an endless parade traipsing through my house. People will notice, and I won’t have my son’s location or condition compromised to those who would do him harm because a few royal nurses couldn’t watch their words around a curious neighbor.”

“Absolutely, only my personal healer and an assistant will be told of this, and strict secrecy will be required.” A thought occurred to him, and he took a deep breath, preparing himself to make the request. “Would you permit Mera to visit him? She loves Kaldur as you do, and... if, indeed, he passes... She would be grateful for an opportunity to say her goodbyes.”

Sha’lain’a softened, and she lowered her gaze. “She may, if she wishes,” she said carefully. “The queen is always welcome in my home.”

“Thank you,” Orin said. Silence curled around them, each descending into thought around the table. After a minute, Orin stood, clearing his throat. “A healer will be here by nightfall,” he promised, and Sha’lain’a stood to see him out. He paused in the doorway and turned back to her. “I am truly sorry,” he said quietly, and she sighed, touching his arm.

“As am I,” she said, without anger or sorrow or anything but exhaustion, “but perhaps for different reasons.”


	6. Chapter 6

At 4:53am on the sixth day after Orin had called off the majority of the search and the fourth day after the original team members had gone their separate ways to grieve, someone was pounding on Zatanna’s door.

M’gann woke to it first - she’d spent a day or two after Artemis had been released, with a walking cast and strict instructions to come back for a follow-up visit that she’d likely ignore, floating around the Watchtower in a stunned, grief-stricken haze before Zatanna had taken her hand, red-eyed and mourning herself, and led her through the zeta tubes to her own apartment. Groaning, she sat up from where she’d collapsed on top of the other girl’s chest and scrubbed at her face. She felt cotton-headed and sore all over, and her voice was raw from crying. “Coming,” she called as Zatanna stirred, levering herself up off the couch and shuffling through the dark to the front door.

Raquel stood on the other side, one hand in her pocket and the other balancing a tray with a pair of to-go cups and a bakery bag propped between them. “M’gann,” she said, blinking in surprise. “Is...Zatanna here?”

“Yeah,” M’gann said, tugging at the sleeve of one of Connor’s sweatshirts. “Yeah, she should be up in a minute. Come in, please.”

“Well damn, wish I would’ve known you were staying over,” Raquel said, closing the door behind her as she stepped into the small entryway. “Don’t know how you feel about hazelnut, but you’re welcome to mine, if you want.”

M’gann rubbed one wrist and attempted a smile. “I’m okay, I don’t really drink caffeine. Thank you, though,” she said, unable to raise her voice much higher than a whisper.

“Raquel,” Zatanna whined, the couch springs squeaking as she rolled over. “Why are you in my house, woman, don’t you know I’m _inactive_ right now.”

She raised an eyebrow in Zatanna’s direction. “I’ll say,” she said dryly. “Get your skinny white ass up, we got called in anyway. Special request.”

That brought Zatanna sitting upright, the loose braid she’d tied to contain her hair while she slept tumbling over her shoulder. “From who,” she demanded, squinting unhappily and stretching her arms over her head.

“Aquaman,” Raquel answered, and if it were possible, Zatanna’s expression soured even further. “Sent out a special request for the entire old guard - you, me, Artemis, Wally, Connor, M’gann, Dick if anybody can find the bastard - plus Boys of both the Beast and Lagoon variety.”

“So, basically everyone who requested leave because of Kaldur,” Zatanna muttered, standing up and padding across the living room, her big t-shirt swaying around her hips. “If this is some _ploy_ to help us get over it faster by keeping us busy, I’ll straight up punch him in the dick myself, I am _so_ not even fucking with this right now.”

“I’ll hold him down for you,” Raquel agreed grimly, holding out the tray to her. “One dark magic blend with nutmeg and almond milk, raspberry cream cheese danish for when you get out the door.”

Zatanna pulled her coffee free and took a sip. “If Waterboy doesn’t like my ass showing up to briefing in yoga pants, he can just fucking deal,” she decided, heading for her bedroom. “I’m giving him an extra large piece of my mind and then coming straight back to bed.”

M’gann tucked her arms around herself as the bedroom door creaked forward to block the view without closing entirely. Raquel’s expression softened, and she reached out with her free hand to touch M’gann’s shoulder. “How’re you holding up,” she asked gently.

“I’m not sure,” M’gann said, feeling a little helpless. “I just... It’s complicated.”

Raquel nodded, rubbing small circles into M’gann’s upper arm through her sleeve. “Losing people always is,” she said with a tired, sad smile.

“It’s my fault,” M’gann mumbled, and met Raquel’s eye. “And I’m not just saying that because I’m grieving and I feel guilty, everyone’s already tried to tell me that and that’s not it. I just... I know that I’m probably the reason he’s...” M’gann inhaled carefully and closed her eyes, unable to say it out loud.

“Baby,” Raquel sighed, pulling her into a one-armed hug. “I don’t...know what happened, and I don’t have any answers like Canary might. But if you wanna talk, I’m just a phone call away, I promise you that.” She pressed her lips to M’gann’s forehead, giving her shoulders a small squeeze. “I miss him too.”

“Thanks,” M’gann whispered with a watery smile. Absently, she flicked a hand over her outfit as Zatanna came out, true to her word, clad in yoga pants and a grey hoodie. When M’gann glanced down, she found herself wearing jeans and a baggy, safe-feeling sweater, what seemed to be her go-to outfit combo when she felt insecure or upset lately.

“Damn, wish I had the energy to do that,” Zatanna muttered good naturedly, taking the bakery bag from Raquel and digging around for her promised danish. “You want half,” she offered, holding the pastry out for M’gann.

“I’m fine,” M’gann said quietly. Zatanna frowned at her and gave an angry little hum.

“You gotta eat, lady, and popcorn and red wine don’t count.”

Raquel leaned in close to her and squinted appraisingly. “Zee’s right,” she said as M’gann shrank back from the scrutiny. “You have to take care of yourself, M’gann. What would Kaldur say?” 

Zatanna swatted at Raquel’s arm with the back of the hand holding the danish, miraculously managing to not smear filling all over her jacket sleeve. “That was low, even for you,” she chided, heading for her front door. “Like, I agree with the sentiment, but wow.”

“The point stands,” Raquel insisted, handing the bakery bag to M’gann. “There. Blackberry scone, and it’d better be gone by the time we get to the zeta tubes.”

* * *

Artemis had forgotten how touchy Wally was. Hell, she’d forgotten how touchy _she_ was, which wasn’t a surprise in itself, given that she’d spent four months behind enemy lines as a different person entirely, and she didn’t exactly have a large reservoir of touchiness to begin with. But since Black Canary had broken the news, and she and Wally had been home to grieve together, she found that a) he couldn’t seem to go more than five minutes without touching her face or her hair or her arms or her hands or her back, like he was continually reassuring himself that she was real; and b) his hands were just about the only thing left to keep her grounded, like he was holding her broken glass pieces together until they could figure out an emotional metaphor for superglue.

“You don’t have to go in,” he said for the fifth time since they’d left the house, one palm pressed to the small of her back. “Just because Superman himself calls your cell phone doesn’t mean you have to go in.”

“Newsflash, genius,” she said, grabbing the open zipper of his jacket and pulling him in to kiss him, “I’m already _in_. No point in turning back now.” She softened and tapped her knuckles against his chest. “Besides. I’m not here because _Superman_ asked for me.”

Wally sighed. “Yeah, I know,” he muttered. Mercifully, he hadn’t tried to tell her Kaldur’s death wasn’t her responsibility - she knew well enough that she hadn’t caused it, but she hadn’t prevented it, either. If he’d tried to contradict that, she might have left him, emotional support system be damned.

“And he did ask for you, too,” Artemis pointed out, limping into the mission room, her walking brace clacking on the floor.

“I’m not here because he asked for me, either.”

Batgirl was a solitary figure in the center of the mission room, standing amid a scattered cloud of holoscreens. “I thought it was just the old team for this,” Wally said when she looked up.

“Yeah, in briefing room two,” she said, gesturing down a hallway branching off the side of the large, circular room. “M’gann, Zee, and Raquel are already here, Conner radioed and said he was, quote unquote, ‘busy, find someone else,’ and we’re still waiting to hear if Dick’s going to bother showing up or calling in.” Even Barbara’s considerable patience with his antics seemed alarmingly depleted.

“Thanks,” Artemis said. Her voice was quiet, swallowed by the huge space around them. Batgirl gave her a sympathetic half-smile.

“Sure thing. Hey, Artemis?”

She paused mid-step, Wally’s hand between her shoulders. Batgirl pressed her lips together, considering her words for a moment. “I didn’t get a chance to talk to you before medical cut you loose, but... For what it’s worth, I’m really glad you’re back.”

Artemis drew in a deep breath, and did her best to return the smile. “Glad to be back,” she said. “Being dead isn't all it’s cracked up to be.”

That got a small, amused chuckle out of Batgirl, and Artemis and Wally detoured around whatever she was working on to head toward the briefing room. Raquel and Zatanna were flanking M’gann on the opposite side of the table, and both looked up braced for a fight when the door slid open.

“Just us,” Wally quipped, half-joking as Zatanna relaxed and Raquel leaned back away from the protective way she’d leaned in front of M’gann.

“Hi, Wally,” M’gann said, almost shy, as he slipped his hand into Artemis’s and led the way around the table. He leaned over the back of her chair to kiss the top of her head before taking a seat next to Raquel.

“No offense,” Zatanna said, raising an eyebrow at him across M’gann and Raquel, “but why call _you_ in? You’re both like, hella retired, right?”

Artemis slumped into a chair next to him and folded her arms. “That’s what we keep telling ourselves, and yet,” she sighed.

Raquel pursed her lips. “Whatever this is about, they managed to get _everyone_ who requested leave after they called off the search parties. It’d better be good, or someone’s ass is gonna get _very_ well acquainted with my size tens.”

Frowning, Wally traced absent swirls on the back of Artemis’s hand with the pad of his thumb. “Am I the only one who can’t help anticipating this is just going to be more bad news about Kaldur,” he asked quietly.

“Oh great, well _now_ I am,” Zatanna grumbled. “But why call us all _up_ here? Are they really _that_ sadistic that they want to watch us take the news in person?”

“Monitoring us for negative stress reactions,” Artemis sighed, rubbing at her face. “Making sure none of us go off the deep end.” Wally’s back went rigid, and he cast a subtle, worried glance at her. She squeezed his hand, knocking the toe of her sneaker into his ankle, and hoped her expression managed to convey _I’m fine now, I promise_.

The doors slid open, and all of them tensed. Dick shuffled into the room, disheveled and exhausted, shoulders hunched in a worn wool coat. He lifted a silent hand in greeting and limped around the other end of the table to the side they’d staked out, taking a seat a chair away from Artemis.

“Holy shit,” Zatanna said after a few seconds of tense silence. “What did you _do_ to yourself?”

Any pretense of professionalism vanished, and Dick scrubbed his hands over his face and through his hair, slumping back in his seat. “Can we just get this over with,” he croaked, his voice shot.

Wally frowned at him and opened his mouth to give him the _you’re not the only one grieving_ lecture when the door slid open again. Aquaman followed Garfield into the room, and waited for the boy to take a seat next to Zatanna before pulling a chair out across the table from them. “Thank you for coming,” Aquaman said graciously, looking at each of them in turn.

“Excuse me,” M’gann said quietly, lifting a hand a little, “aren’t we still waiting for Lagoon Boy?”

To everyone’s surprise, Aquaman heaved a weighty sigh and slumped in his chair. Dick and Artemis exchanged glances. The king of Atlantis _never_ slouched. “I have spoken to La’gaan,” he said carefully, meeting M’gaan’s gaze. “His...reactions to what I have to tell you were understandable, but...complicated. I did not want him to cause the rest of you undue stress in this matter.”

Zatanna leaned forward. “All due respect, Aquaman,” she said, her tone anything but respectful, “but can we just rip the damn Band-aid off already? Some of us have grief hangovers to get back to.”

“Zee,” Raquel hissed.

If Aquaman took offense to her irritation or crass phrasing, he didn’t show it. He merely sat up a little bit and took a steadying breath. “...Kaldur is alive.”

Artemis’s brain stalled out as a shocked silence settled around them. “What,” someone choked, and it took an embarrassing number of seconds for her to realize that someone was her.

Everyone else seemed to find their voices soon after. “What _happened_ ,” Raquel demanded, sitting forward in her seat. “How long have you been keeping this from us,” Dick snapped, his seat rolling backwards like he was intending to shoot to his feet and storm out at any moment. “Is he okay,” M’gann asked quietly, just barely audible under all the other noise.

Something cold settled in Artemis’s stomach, and she gripped Wally’s hand as tight as she could. “Why hasn’t he been in contact,” she asked, her tone low and dangerous, and all other noise in the room came to another abrupt halt. “Is Atlantis keeping him prisoner?”

Aquaman closed his eyes for a moment, looking pained. “I said he was alive,” he said, sadness hanging from his voice like a lead weight, “but I did not say he was _alright_.”

Her earlier impudence gone, Zatanna set one hand on M’gann’s back and leaned forward. “Start at the beginning,” she said, her tone soft and entirely without patience for rank or station. “Where is he now?”

Aquaman dragged a hand over his beard. “Safe, with his mother. Garth - whom most of you would know as Tempest - followed the sub he took from Manta’s fleet. He came upon it after Kaldur had disposed of the weapon it was carrying, and it had set down on the ocean floor. Inside, he discovered Kaldur was mortally wounded and had lost a grave amount of blood.” He looked up at met Artemis’s eye. “You understand correctly that Atlantis is...less than willing to forgive Kaldur at present, even in the face of his heroism. Garth knows this perhaps better than even I do, and he knew to take Kaldur somewhere he would not be discovered accidentally.”

“Sha’lain’a,” M’gann murmured. At the questioning glances of everyone else on their side of the table, she cleared her throat quietly and lowered her gaze to the table. “Kaldur’s mom,” she explained.

Blinking, Raquel sat back in her seat. “Never really considered that he might still have parents, to be honest. Huh.”

“What’s his status,” Wally asked, apparently striving for professional and objective, and Dick sunk a little lower in his seat.

“His injuries are severe,” Aquaman said carefully. “He was only barely conscious when I saw him, and even then, he is delirious and agitated when he is awake. I have sent the best of Poseidonis’s healers to him to aid in his recovery, but he is still far too weak to be moved.” He took a deep breath and folded his hands on the table’s surface. “I would love nothing so much as to be able to promise sincerely that Kaldur will live, but the truth of this matter is... We may yet lose him. The healers may ultimately fail, and this hope will have been for nothing, that is true. But I am of the mind that there have been enough secrets regarding Kaldur’ahm, and those secrets have nearly cost him his life. I am loathe to add to their ranks now.”

Dick stood abruptly, hands clenching in the fabric of his coat. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, and closed it shut again with a small shake of his head. Without another word, he hurried for the door and vanished.

“Asshole,” Zatanna muttered resentfully at the space he had once occupied.

“Can...” Everyone turned at the small voice from the end of the table. Garfield shrank away from the sudden attention, but cleared his throat and focused on Aquaman anyway. “Can we get a message to him? Like, a letter or something?”

“Logistically, it might be a challenge,” Wally cautioned, at just about the same time Artemis nodded and said, “We’ll make it happen.” They looked at each other, and Artemis’s eyebrows bounced up. Wally pressed his lips together, but nodded his agreement.

M’gann reached in front of Zatanna to take Garfield’s hand. “What do you want to say?”

“He just... I think he needs to know that we don’t blame him for what happened. If he does... He just needs to know that.”

A memory of a Watchtower hospital bed and a teary-eyed Martian clinging to her drove the air from Artemis’s lungs. _What if-- What if he never intended to come back, after he stole the sub?_ _What if he can’t remember that we love him and want him to come home, and that’s my fault?_ Apparently, M’gann was remembering the same thing, because she gave a small, strangled noise and buried her face in her hands.

Wally let go of Artemis’s hand and rubbed the top of her shoulders as he pushed his chair back. “I’m going to go find Dick,” he said quietly, leaning over to kiss her forehead before making his way around the room. He paused as the door opened and looked at Aquaman, slouched in his chair and staring, lost in thought, at the table’s surface. “Thank you for telling us,” he said carefully, and left before Aquaman could answer.


	7. Chapter 7

“Dick, I swear to _god_ , if you get within ten _fucking_ feet of those zeta tubes, I will kill you myself!”

He flinched and turned back to find Wally stalking across the expanse of the now-empty mission room. “Wally,” he started, taking a cautious step backward toward the platform.

In an instant, Wally had his arm in a vice grip, dragging him around in the direction of the balcony that overlooked the expanse of garden that helped regulate the Watchtower’s air supply. “Don’t _Wally_ me,” he snapped, his grip tightening as Dick struggled weakly against him. “What the _fuck_ , man? Aquaman just told us Kaldur is _alive_ , and that’s not worth your time? What could you _possibly_ have better to do?”

Dick flinched as Wally shoved him into the railing. “It’s-- It’s complicated, okay?”

“Well _un_ complicate it!” Wally gave him another shove that pushed him back into the corner between the railing and the wall. “You’re not the only person who’s been grieving here, jackass, and honestly I’m getting _sick_ of waiting for you to pull your head out of your ass and realize that!”

“But _I’m_ the reason he’s dying!” Wally’s spine went rigid, and Dick backed away from him, pressed into the wall like with enough willpower, he could density shift right through it. “This is my fault, don’t you _understand_ that? If he dies... I killed him, Wally. _I_ killed him.”

He didn’t know what he was expecting - Wally softening, maybe, sighing and pulling him into a hug and promising everything would be okay, Kaldur would be fine and they’d come out the other side of this mess stronger than they’d been before. He didn’t expect Wally to cross his arms and take a half-step backward and say, “Yeah, you’re right.” Hearing it out loud, from his best friend no less, was nothing short of a body blow, even with as much as he’d tortured himself with the knowledge over the past few days. Dick felt his shoulders curling in like a black hole had opened up in the pit of his stomach. “This is your fault. It’s also Black Manta’s fault, and the Light’s fault, and the Reach’s fault, and Kaldur’s fault too. It’s _everybody’s_ fault.” Wally sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Even mine.”

“How is this _possibly_ your fault?”

“I let you go through with this at all,” Wally snapped. “You think I’m not _intimately_ familiar with how much of a fucking dumbass you can be? I’m your _best friend_. I should’ve made you call this whole goddamn thing off when you first told me what was going on - Kaldur had only been down there for two weeks, we could’ve gotten him back without anyone getting hurt. But _no_ , I made the mistake of thinking you had it handled, and I let you get Artemis sucked into your bullshit too.” He took a sharp breath. “You crossed a line, Dick, and I didn’t call you on it. Am I as much to blame for this as you are? Not by a long shot. But if you think you’re the only one living with guilt over this _fiasco_ , you’ve got your head so far up your ass, you couldn’t crawl out without a flashlight and a map.”

Dick pressed his hands to his face and took a trembling breath. “Hey,” Wally said, grabbing his wrists and pulling them away, “you wanna be an objective leader? _Own_ your _shit_. You made a bad call. Kaldur was in _no_ position to be going that far undercover. You _knew_ that, and let him go anyway. And if you _ever_ want any hope of being able to look at yourself in the mirror again without wanting to throw up, you _have_ to own that. You don’t get to run away from what’s happening now.”

“I can’t _fix_ this,” Dick managed, his eyes burning. A stress headache was building behind his eyes, and the lights in the mission room suddenly all seemed like spotlights fixed on him.

Wally sighed. “No, you can’t. None of us can. But we owe it to Kaldur to own our mistakes here. How many times have we left Kaldur to hang for what _we_ fucked up?”

Dick flinched, his wrists still stuck in Wally’s grip. “Too many,” he mumbled, staring moodily down at the garden below them.

“Damn right. Kaldur deserves better from us.” He sighed and let go of Dick’s wrists, letting them drop to his sides. He studied Dick for a minute and sighed. “Oh, goddamnit,” he muttered, reaching out to drag him into a rough hug. “You look like shit."

“Shoulda seen the other guy,” Dick mumbled into Wally’s shoulder, clutching at the back of his jacket with equal force.

“Dumbass,” Wally grumbled. One palm curled around the back of Dick’s skull, the other flat against his spine. “You could’ve called me.”

“Thought you were pissed at me.” 

Wally snorted. “No shit, of course I’m pissed at you. Doesn’t mean you can’t call.” Dick tucked his face into the side of Wally’s neck and fought down a wave of tears. “Dick, I already lost one friend to this mess,” Wally said, and the anger and frustration was gone, leaving only a tired sadness in its wake. “I never wanted to lose you, too.”

* * *

Shayeris was dark and quiet when the two women passed through the buildings toward a shuttered house tucked between two blue-grey hills. Mera followed just behind the healer, stirring up a small current to carry her bag of supplies as they swam. Hope and anxiety churned in her stomach - Orin had only said that Kaldur was in desperate need of a healer, but that could mean many things, and she wasn’t sure what they’d find.

Mera had only met Kaldur’s mother once, at the ceremony held to name him Orin’s protege. Still, Kaldur had spoken of her often when he was younger, and Mera remembered her bright eyes and gold hair rippling like silk. “Sha’lain’a,” she greeted, when the woman met them at the door.

“My queen,” Sha’lain’a returned, averting her eyes respectfully. Mera reached out for her hand.

“Please, call me Mera.” She gestured to the woman loitering to her right. “This is La’ani. She has been a healer in the royal household for many years, I trust her with my life.”

Sha’lain’a waved them inside and led them down the hall. “Garth,” she called softly, standing aside to let La’ani pass into the room first.

He stood from where he’d been sitting next to Kaldur and hurried to give the healer space. “Queen Mera! I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”

Mera held out her hands to him and he slumped into the embrace she offered. “As much as I trust my husband, I had to see him for myself,” she said, smoothing her palm over his hair once before releasing him. “How is he?”

Garth glanced at the healer, who had carefully set about peeling back layers of blood-soaked bandages, and then at Sha’lain’a. “Not well,” he confessed, one hand coming up to worry at his collar. “He sleeps comfortably enough it seems, but when he is awake... He is delirious, mumbling to himself about gods and punishment and the necessity of his actions. I can only understand a fraction of what he says, but what I can is...troubled, and frightening to hear.”

As she stripped away a layer of darkly saturated gauze and thin tendrils started to curl through the water around the wound, La’ani frowned and gave his side an experimental prodding with her fingertips. He moaned and made an unconscious effort to twist away from her, but didn’t awaken. “Infection,” she declared unhappily. “The bandages remained too tight for too long, and the wound is beginning to fester.” She looked up at Sha’lain’a, who was fidgeting anxiously with a thin gold necklace. “Not your fault, these bandages likely were applied on the surface by inexperienced hands, to stop the initial bleeding. Removing them might have caused further damage, without experience in doing so.” She tsked and turned to dig through her supplies. “Of all the damage this boy has done to himself, this is by far the worst I’ve seen.”

“La’ani was the one to tend to Kaldur during his training,” Mera explained to Sha’lain’a. “Orin and I thought perhaps a familiar face would be welcome to him.”

“Thank you,” Sha’lain’a told La’ani softly. “Your help is greatly appreciated.”

“I find,” she said, leaning forward to begin cleaning the wound, “that it is far easier to forgive someone when you have known them as a child. Kaldur and I are well-acquainted, and he was a sweet boy. Regardless of what he has done since, it is my job to see that he recovers.”

“Do you think he will,” Garth asked. “Recover, I mean.”

La’ani pursed her lips. “Hard to say. He is feverish and very ill indeed, but the worst of the bleeding appears to have stopped, and with a little attention, I am certain the infection can be managed and the wound will close. Were there any other injuries when you brought him here?”

“Scrapes, mostly,” Sha’lain’a answered. “The majority of those have healed already.”

“Small favors,” La’ani sighed. She finished redressing the wound and looked back at Mera, eyebrows raised. “All we can do is wait, my queen.”

Mera studied Kaldur’s face - even in sleep, he seemed unsettled. Something deep inside her chest ached, and she turned to Sha’lain’a. “May I have a moment with him,” she asked, barely above a whisper.

Sha’lain’a hesitated, lips pressing together, before giving a small nod. Mera gave her a grateful smile and moved to settle next to the bed.


	8. Chapter 8

Roy bumped the silverware drawer closed with his hip and reached over to turn the dial on the stove burner. One of the benefits to parenthood was that he’d finally figured out how to feed _himself_ , in anticipation of having to feed another, significantly more helpless human in a few short years. For now, Lian subsisted on plant-based purees and Cheerios, idiot-proof even by Roy’s admittedly rather pathetic standards, but it wouldn’t be too long before he was cooking real people food for two, instead of just himself. Didn’t leave a lot of time to hone his game, but he was learning.

He checked back into his surroundings just in time to almost miss the scrape of a key in the lock on his front door. Frowning, he finished dishing his pasta into a bowl and wiped his palms on his jeans, reaching for the gun he kept in the junk drawer by the edge of the counter.

“Roy,” his unexpected visitor called, and he sighed, putting the gun back.

“Keep it down, it’s late,” he warned as Artemis closed the door behind her. “And this is not why I gave you a key to my place.” She didn’t answer, just stood just inside the front door looking lost, and he set his cereal bowl of pasta down again. “...Are you drunk?”

“What?” Artemis’s eyes snapped to him, wide and-- Shell-shocked, if he was being honest. She blinked at him, and in an instant, seemed to come back to herself. “No, I’m not _stupid_ ,” she snapped, lacking its usual heat. “Do you know how many medications I’m on right now?” She sighed, deflating a little, and pulled her fingers through her hair, raking it away from her face. “Really wish I was drunk, though, like goddamn.”

Roy raised an eyebrow at her. “Alright, so drunken zeta travel is off the table. Is there a reason you’re sober and standing in my apartment at--” he paused, pulling his phone out to check the time “--almost 11pm on a weeknight, looking like microwaved death?”

Artemis took two quick, distressed-sounding breaths, still frozen in front of the front door, before crossing the ten feet between them and throwing her arms around his waist, burying her face in his shoulder.

“Whoa, hey, okay,” Roy muttered, hands fluttering uselessly for a second before settling on her back, rubbing awkward circles across her shoulders. “Alright, what’s this?”

She shook her head mutely into his shoulder, and he sighed and cast a longing glance at his pasta before hugging her back in earnest. “It’s okay, I’ve got you,” he mumbled, trying for soothing.

After another minute, she sniffed and stepped away, rolling her shoulders awkwardly before folding her arms. “Sorry, I just-- Wally’s working tonight, and I couldn’t handle being home alone right now.”

“Well, mi casa and all that,” he said, grabbing his pasta and heading for the couch. “I’d offer you a beer, but.”

“Maybe not the best idea, yeah,” she agreed, following a couple steps behind him.

Roy dropped down and sprawled out on one end, kicking one foot up on the ragged coffee table he’d picked up for three bucks at a garage sale. He shoveled a forkful of his pasta into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully for a second. “So,” he said once he’d swallowed, “what’s up?”

Artemis hunched into the back of his couch. “...Did Wally talk to you?”

Roy raised an eyebrow. “He came by and told me you weren’t dead, gave me the Sparknotes version of the undercover thing, which paired with the fact that I’ve actually _seen_ you in the last week would explain why I’m not babbling about you being a ghost or something right now. But no, I haven’t really talked to him since.”

If anything, his attempt at humor just seemed to make her more agitated. She twisted her hands in her lap, shoulders hunched and eyes fixed on the threadbare carpet. “Did he tell you about Kaldur,” she asked quietly.

He set his pasta down again, a dense foreboding beginning to curl in the pit of his stomach. “He said that he was undercover with you, if that’s what you mean?”

“Ah, fuck,” she muttered, her head falling back to flop on the back of the couch. She took a deep breath, and Roy’s apprehension only grew.

“Didn’t he come back with you,” he prodded, sitting up. “I thought he was just recovering on the Watchtower?”

Artemis winced. “Goddamnit, Wally,” she sighed, rubbing her eyes.

“Artemis,” Roy said, a couple decibels away from snapping at her. “What happened to Kaldur?”

“We... We lost him,” she said after a long pause. “He stole a sub and left on his own, and that was the last I saw of him.”

Something that probably didn’t have a right to still be worrying about Kaldur’s health and safety kicked to life like an engine revving. “It’s been over a _week_ and you haven’t _found_ him yet,” he asked incredulously. “Christ, Artemis, he could be _dead_ by now, when were you planning on telling me any of this?”

She pressed her palms to her face. “He’s not dead,” she said after a second.

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Because we found him, Roy,” she sighed. “We know exactly where he is, and he’s not dead.”

Relief swept into the spaces around the growing fear in his stomach. “Damn,” he muttered, relaxing into the back of the couch. “You could’ve led with that, jesus. Is he okay, though? Medical have any thoughts on when they’ll let him go?”

“Would you stop jumping to conclusions and just _listen_ ,” Artemis snapped. “We lost him. We thought he was dead. Now we’ve found him, and he’s not, but he’s apparently very injured, and he-- It’s touch and go right now, Roy. We just don’t know, okay?”

The fear returned in smaller measures, reshaped into different forms by the new information. “And were you planning to tell me _any_ of this,” he asked, his voice low.

“I just _did_ , fuckstick,” she said irritably, hands still pressed against her face. “Why do you think I’m here? I just found out myself.”

“You knew he was missing,” Roy pointed out, anger starting to consume the fear as fuel. “You knew he was missing, possibly _dead_ , and you didn’t bother to let me know?”

Artemis bristled. “Okay, in case you hadn’t _noticed_ , I just got out of the hospital like three days ago, and I thought Wally had told you. I don’t fucking deserve this from you, okay? You wanna be pissed off, be pissed off at Wally, but I’m _just_ as fucking helpless as you are.”

Roy exhaled roughly and shoved himself to his feet. He started to pace on the other side of the coffee table, raking his hands through his hair. He’d just barely come to terms with the idea that Kaldur _wasn’t_ evil, was still working on the idea that Kaldur hadn’t trusted him enough for even the smallest heads-up before he’d gone under - the idea that Kaldur might _die_ threw everything into chaos. “Where is he,” he demanded.

“Home, I guess,” Artemis sighed, and Roy’s blood ran cold.

“Who the _hell_ let that happen? You _know_ how hostile Poseidonis is going to be. I mean, I’ve only talked to La’gaan for like thirty seconds and _I_ know that. He’s a sitting duck down there!”

“Not _that_ home. He’s with his mom, in Shayeris. Apparently he’s pretty well hidden, and Aquaman sent a healer--”

“ _Aquaman?_ He’s in charge of this?”

“As king of Atlantis _and_ Kaldur’s mentor, yeah, he is,” Artemis shot back. She sighed and slumped back into the couch. “I know, I’ve been thinking the same thing. But he was the only one with resources and manpower to look for him, and now that he’s been found, he seems...honestly concerned for Kaldur’s well-being, from what I’ve seen.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Roy muttered resentfully. “Even death row inmates get medical treatment.”

“That’s _enough_ ,” Artemis snapped. “Even if we don’t trust Aquaman or Atlantis, we trust _Tempest_ , who is with him, and we trust Kaldur’s mom. _If_ there was a problem, they’d contact us for help. I’m sure of it.”

“Maybe,” Roy said, unconvinced. A small thump drew his attention away from the woman on his couch, before toddling footsteps heralded Lian’s arrival in the living room. “Baby, what’re you doing,” he sighed, walking around the coffee table to scoop her up. “It’s like three hours past your bedtime, and how did you even get out of your crib?”

“Dat,” Lian asked, reaching out a pudgy, grasping hand toward Artemis as Roy situated her on his hip.

“That’s Auntie Artemis,” he said, one hand curving around her tiny ribs for balance. “She’s Mama’s sister.” He glanced at Artemis, who was staring at Lian with something like shock. “What, they didn’t tell you I have a kid now?”

“No, I... I knew, we've _met_ , I just... She's gotten so big,” Artemis said, her voice faint. She gave Lian a watery smile and a small wave.

Something in Roy softened, and he sighed, pressed a kiss to Lian’s temple, and swung her down into Artemis’s lap. “Go say hi, kiddo,” he said, and managed a vindictive little smile as Lian immediately seized a handful of Artemis’s hair. “Hang onto that, I’ll be right back.”

Artemis twisted and watched him head into the kitchen. “What?”

He reached up for the small collection of half-empty liquor bottles he kept above the refrigerator. “You might not be able to drink, but that doesn’t mean I can’t.”


	9. Chapter 9

She heard La’gaan long before she saw him. The unmistakable clatter of training dummies bouncing off the gym’s walls reverberated down the hall toward M’gann, and even without the tentative mental hand she sent out, testing the psychic waters, she could feel rage pulsing off him like a murderous tide. She hesitated before stepping into the field of the motion sensor over the door, and took a small step into the gym when the doors slid open.

With an enraged yell, La’gaan twisted in the center sparring ring, one leg swinging up in an arcing kick, and one of the armless, headless mobile dummies - equipped with motorized wheels and a rudimentary AI that kept them swarming in unpredictable patterns around you for practice fighting multiple assailants - went flying against the wall to M’gann’s right and bounced with a thump that felt hard enough to break bone. M’gann winced and fought the urge to flee. “What,” La’gaan demanded from the center of the sparring ring, fists curling and uncurling at his sides.

“I-- I talked to Aquaman,” she said carefully. “He told us that he’d talked to you. I just wanted to see if you were okay.”

La’gaan bristled. “ _Fine_ ,” he snapped, turning away from her.

“You’re _not_ ,” she blurted, before she had a chance to examine the wisdom of calling him on it. He turned back and glared at her, and she forced herself to hold her ground. “I can feel your anger, La’gaan. You’re _not_ fine.” M’gann took a hesitant step toward him. “I thought you’d be... Well. Not this _angry_ , for starters. Kaldur’s _alive_. You’ve been his friend longer than any of us, I thought this would be good news for you?”

M’gann didn’t need telepathic translation to know that the small burst of Atlantean he muttered under his breath at her was a bitter insult. “I _was_ his friend,” he said angrily, “and that makes his _betrayal_ that much worse.”

“He didn’t _betray_ anyone,” M’gann argued. “You heard the mission briefing - he’s been _undercover_ , in a role he was uniquely suited to play. He was _never_ evil, I don’t understand why you’re still treating him like the bad guy!”

La’gaan spun back toward her, his face tight with fury. “Because he _is,”_ he exploded, his voice reverberating off the high ceilings. “He doesn’t just get to _change his mind_ and decide he’s still one of us because his side _lost!_ ”

“How can you say that,” M’gann demanded. Distantly, she recognized that the anger she was feeling likely wasn’t hers - it felt off-center within her, the way it always did when she let the emotions of others affect her own. But she was exhausted, psychically and emotionally and physically, and anger was a welcome stretch after the crumpled feeling of grief and anxiety, and anyway, it was the only language La’gaan was going to understand right now. “You know what undercover _means!”_

“He _kidnapped me_ ,” La’gaan yelled. “He _destroyed_ my _home_! Kaldur’ahm is a liar and a murderer and a traitor to _everything_ he swore allegiance to, and despite you surface dwellers’ frantic attempts to justify his actions, I see no reason to just forgive him for that!”

“Everything he did was for a reason! You even said that the damage to Poseidonis could have, and likely _should have,_ been much worse than it was,” she argued. “So _obviously_ he was trying his best to not harm civilians, you and I _both_ know that if Aqualad wanted to do damage, he’s more than capable. And anyway, he’s _dying_ , La’gaan, because of the risk he took for the rest of Atlantis, and Earth as a whole. Doesn’t _that_ warrant a little forgiveness, if nothing else does?”

La’gaan’s face darkened. “He should be _dead_ ,” he snarled, and M’gann froze, eyes wide, the words a punch to the stomach. “And I am _ashamed,_ that my king refuses to drag him out of whatever hole he’s crawled into and force him to face justice for what he’s done.”

M’gann couldn’t speak, paralyzed with the churning chaos of emotion, between her grief and shock and La’gaan’s rage. He stared hard at her for a second before shaking his head with a disgusted sound in the back of his throat. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that _you’ve_ fallen for his act as well. You always _were_ soft-hearted.”

Her eyes stung. Even after they’d broken up, La’gaan had been hurt, but not bitter or hateful toward her. She had never been the target of his anger, even if she did know as a spectator just how volatile his temper could be. Now, his rage gripped her psychically like a burning vice, squeezing and scorching in equal measure. She couldn’t escape, could barely move. “La’gaan,” she managed, and her voice failed her. _Calm down_ , she wanted to beg, _please, you’re hurting me_.

He gave her another baleful glare and shook his head mutely, stalking around her toward the door. The door slid open, a gentle hiss in the sudden, ringing silence, and his footsteps stomped down the hall toward the locker room. His anger receded - not in intensity, but in proximity - and M’gann sucked in a lungful of air, gasping and choking. Her knees wobbled, and she took a few hesitant steps toward the bench by the wall. It felt like she had held up a mountain for hours, leaving her spent and weak. Her mind felt blistered and raw, and a fresh wave of tears welled up as she curled in on herself telepathically. Aquaman had been right not to involve him in the group meeting, she thought, her hands trembling - if she’d had to face his wrath with everyone else’s emotions bearing down on her as well, she would have crumpled much sooner than she did.

She slumped against the wall and buried her face in her hands, unable to stop the first choking sob from wrenching out of her.

* * *

“I’ve been thinking,” Dick said solemnly.

Zatanna raised an eyebrow at her wine glass and shifted her phone to her other ear. “Seems to me that’s why we’re in this mess in the first place,” she said coolly, pulling her feet up on her couch. “ _Maybe_ that is a habit you should try to _quit_. For the good of the group.”

She could practically feel him wince across the phone connection. “I deserved that,” he sighed, and some small part of Zatanna stirred in victory. “But I had a question for you.”

Sighing, she raised her wine glass. “Fire away,” she said, rolling her eyes at her living room ceiling.

“Is M’gann staying with you?”

“Yes,” Zatanna said slowly. “Why do you ask?”

“Do you think you might--”

“Ohhh, no,” she interrupted, sitting up so fast the wine in her glass almost sloshed over. “No. Not again, Boy Wonder, you do your own dirty work this time.”  

“I’ve never--”

“Bullshit! That glamour charm you wanted was for _Artemis_ , and you didn’t have the balls to just _ask_ me for it, you had to _blackmail me_ , you lying, arrogant son of a bitch!”

Dick sighed, sounding defeated. “Alright, I...deserved that, too. But I swear, Zee, this time I just need a sounding board. I don’t... I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”

“With your current track record, odds are very good that it’s not,” Zatanna muttered. “Fine. Magic 8 ball, at your service.”

Dick paused, long enough that Zatanna had opened her mouth to ask if he was still there when he started to speak. “I don’t know how much you know about... M’gann’s involvement in this,” he said, sounding distinctly uncomfortable.

“...Artemis kidnapped her for something, I remember that,” Zatanna said softly. “Let her go after like eight hours. I haven’t read the reports, if that’s what you’re asking.”

He sighed, weighty and exhausted. “Well, um. M’gann....may have, sort of, psychically...damaged. Kaldur. A little bit.”

Zatanna blinked. “She what?”

“She thought he was evil,” he said quickly, like he was suddenly afraid Zatanna might lash out against the Martian currently out like a light in her bedroom. “We were rescuing La’gaan and Jaime and Bart, and... She met Kaldur in a hallway, and she kind of...brain blasted him. Sent him into a catatonic state for just over a week, by Artemis’s account, it wasn’t pretty.”

“Oh my god,” Zatanna murmured, casting a wide-eyed glance at the bedroom door. “No wonder she feels so guilty about all of this.”

“Yeah, um.” Dick cleared his throat nervously. “Artemis’s...kidnapping, was so M’gann could try to undo some of the damage she’d done. He had been seemingly back to his old self when they let her go, and M’gann was fairly confident that he would make a full recovery, but...”

“You’re not so sure?”

“I finally got in touch with Garth,” Dick said gravely. “He said that Kaldur’s wound was infected, and he’s fighting that, but he’s...apparently having trouble distinguishing fever dreams from reality when he _is_ awake. It could easily just be the fever, Atlantean’s historically don’t handle surface bacterial infections well.”

Zatanna set her glass down on the coffee table. “But you’re thinking it might be leftovers from M’gann’s psychic IED?”

“I’m not sure,” he said carefully. “But even if it’s not, she’s more or less the only one of us who can make the journey to Atlantis to verify his condition, and... It’s not that I don’t trust Aquaman, I do, I’ve known him since I was ten, but...” He sighed. “I’d feel better having someone _we_ trust down there as back-up. In case something goes wrong.”

“Wow,” she muttered. “But yeah, I hear you on the ‘she’s the only one’ thing. Did you hear what happened with La’gaan?”

“What? I didn’t hear anything beyond what Aquaman said when he told us La’gaan wasn’t going to show up to the briefing. What happened?”

Zatanna drained her glass and stood, heading for the bottle she’d left in the kitchen. “Apparently M’gann went to go check on him, and he was in the gym just beating the shit out of training dummies, and when she tried to talk about it, he got angry enough to hurt her.”

“Are you _kidding_ , what did he do? I didn’t see a medical report, what happened?”

She shook her head and dumped the last of the bottle into her glass. “Physically, he didn’t touch her. But he was _angry_ enough that he hurt her psychically. She’s sleeping it off, but she was very shook up when I brought her back from the Watchtower. I think Canary needs to have strong words with that boy.”

“He and Kaldur have been friends for almost a _decade_ , why would he be that angry?”

“Something about him not believing Kaldur didn’t really go dark side on us,” Zatanna sighed, scooping up her wineglass and heading back to the couch. “He’s of the opinion that Kaldur should stand trial for his crimes against Atlantis.”

“Oh my god,” Dick said faintly.

“Point being,” Zatanna continued, “I probably wouldn’t send him down there for a while. I get the impression that Aquaman conveniently forgot to mention _where_ Kaldur is when he told him, so maybe we should spread the word to keep it that way.”

“Yeah, that might be a good idea,” Dick sighed. “God, this is so messed up.”

“You’re telling me,” she grumbled.

He sighed. “Maybe it isn’t a great idea for M’gann to be down there.”

Zatanna frowned. “As much as I really hate to validate your strategic abilities and reinflate your insufferable god complex, it’s a sound plan, Dick.”

“But emotionally, is she up to it? I mean, seeing Kaldur injured like that might send her into a tailspin, who knows.”

“Come on, give the girl a little credit,” Zatanna chided. “And honestly? I think the idea that she can’t do anything to help is what’s really eating at her right now. Giving her something concrete that she can do might make some of that go away.” She took a sip and stared into her glass, suddenly gripped by the memory of her father intoning _In vino veritas_ into a glass of his own after a rough day. Somehow, even after six years, the pang of longing hadn’t gotten any easier. “She knows her own boundaries, what she can and can’t handle. Present the option, give her a choice, and she’ll tell you if she feels up to it. She’s a big girl, Dick, she doesn’t need you to decide her limits for her.”

He exhaled carefully, and in her mind’s eye, she could see him nodding. “Yeah, okay. That’s fair.”

“Of course it is, I am a just and wise woman,” she said loftily. “But maybe give her a day to recover, she’s still pretty shook up about La’gaan.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course. I, um.” He hesitated for a second. “Would you, um. Would you mind keeping an eye on her, letting me know when it’d be a good time to bring it up? I just really don’t want to upset her.”

“Get me a date with Batgirl, and we’ll talk.” She grinned when Dick choked a little and took a long sip from her wine glass. “I’ll keep an eye on her, but if she says no, that’s it. You don’t bring it up again, got it?”

“Got it. Thanks, Zee.”

“I’d say anytime, Boy Wonder, but I don’t want you getting ideas.”


	10. Chapter 10

For all his super strength, the tablet in Conner’s hands felt like it was going to drag him right through the floor of the hay loft and down into the dirt. There was something about the Kents’ barn that felt safe, and even though he’d been given the run of the guest bedroom upstairs in the old farmhouse, he spent much of his time tucked in between bales of hay, breathing in the sweet, dusty smell of sun-warmed barnwood. Now, his back pressed against the weathered wood and the tablet balanced on his knees, it seemed like it was the only safe place left in a world swiftly careening out of control.

He’d been over the full mission file twice already - comm transcripts, intel data packets, Artemis’s account (very obviously written under the influence of some heavy painkillers, if the typos were anything to go by), and Dick’s mission overview. Everything he’d expect from an official mission file, with the glaring omission of Kaldur’s reports.

_Not that we’ll ever see those now_ , Conner thought bitterly, rubbing the back of his neck. For as furious as Kaldur’s betrayal had made him ( _not furious_ , part of him thought, _confused and shocked and hurt_ ), his apparent death had hit him like a freight train with a Kryptonite cattle catcher.

Kaldur had been the first to trust him. Not the only one, especially not now, but he had been the first, and that always had been...special. Solid, when nothing else seemed to be. That no matter what he did, what he screwed up, Kaldur would never write him off. _And what did you do to repay him,_ a traitorous part of him whispered, _when he left you?_

Oh, he’d fought it, before the evidence had become too much to ignore, snapping at people and isolating himself from the perceived reality. But from the moment Garth had told them the truth about Kaldur’s biological father, bitter and snarling himself, part of Conner had wondered. What if he _was_ capable of it? Was blood any different than CADMUS programming? He and Roy had both been helpless to resist, what if Kaldur was in the same boat?

And then Malina Island had happened, and... He’d been all too willing to write Kaldur off. Now, here he sat, trying to reconcile the betrayal with the grief, and cycling around and around to the same question, like water around a drain: _why couldn’t he tell me?_

Was there something wrong with Conner? Some residual piece of CADMUS programming that made him a liability to trust with sensitive information? Kaldur had known him better perhaps than he knew himself - certainly understood him better, at the very least. Had he seen something in Conner that made him unworthy of his trust?

Against his hip, his cell phone buzzed. Startled, he dug in his pocket for it - M’gann’s face lit up his screen. He swiped a calloused thumb across it and shifted in the narrow alcove built of hay bales. “Uh.” He cleared his throat, his voice stiff and awkward with disuse - he hadn’t spoken in at least a day, too consumed with his thoughts. “Yeah?”

“Hi,” M’gann said, and her voice sounded small, unsteady. He sat up a little.

“Hey, you okay?”

“I...” She sighed. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she decided. “Are you still in Kansas?”

“Mm.” He flicked the index finger of his free hand over the surface of the tablet, turning a page to a new document. “For a few more days, I think. Harvester’s down, but I guess the part should be in by tomorrow, so I’m going to stay and help fix it.”

“That’s kind of you,” M’gann said, distracted. Even without the mind link at such a distance, he could tell something was troubling her. “I, um. I just wanted to warn you that I’m...probably going to be out of contact, for... I’m not sure how long. But my League comm will probably work, I think, so you can get a hold of me that way. Just not on my cell phone.”

That grabbed his attention immediately. “Out of contact? Is this about that meeting yesterday? Are they sending you on a mission, I thought you were on indefinite leave?”

M’gann made a small, uncertain sound. “It’s...very complicated, and I don’t want to keep you from--”

“You aren’t keeping me from anything,” he sighed. “I’ve been sitting in the hay loft for the past two hours. What’s going on? You shouldn’t be _going_ anywhere, that’s the whole point of the inactive roster.”

“Conner... This might be a conversation you want to have in person. I’ll leave it up to you, but... It’s kind of a big deal.”

Something twisted in the pit of his stomach. “Just tell me,” he said quietly.

M’gann took a breath to steel herself. “I’m going to Atlantis for a while,” she started. “There’s... I need to make something right. Something that might be my fault.”

“M’gann, you’re not making any sense,” he told her, feeling the beginnings of frustration start to prickle along his shoulders. “Just _tell_ me. Please.”

She paused. “...Kaldur is alive,” she said, her voice almost a whisper through the speaker of his phone. The world seemed to screech to a halt - the crickets under the loft stopped chirping, the wind rustling the leaves in the oak tree behind the barn fell silent. Conner stared blindly at the edge of the loft, his grip going slack on the edge of his tablet. It slid from his lap to the hay bale underneath him with a soft _thump_ that jolted him back to reality.

“He’s... What?”

“That’s what the briefing was about,” she said gently. “And, um. Speaking of that, why didn’t you come?”

Conner shrugged, still trying to wrap his mind around the bombshell she’d just dropped on him. “Thought they were ignoring the fact that all of us were inactive and sending us out.” He cleared his throat again. “That, and I really didn’t think I could look Dick in the eye without snapping his head off.”

“Conner,” she chided, startled.

“It’s true,” he muttered. “If anyone’s responsible for Kaldur’s-- well, what happened to him, it’s _him_. I was angry. ...Still am, but it’s getting better.” He shook his head. “Kaldur’s _alive_? Where is he? Why hasn’t he checked in?” _Is he hiding from_ us _?_

“He’s...not doing well. He was injured pretty badly when the mission ended, and now... I guess the wound is pretty badly infected and not healing correctly, and he still might not make it. Garth found him, and he and Sha’lain’a are looking after him now,” she added quickly, trying to keep the news as optimistic as possible, “and Aquaman said Queen Mera accompanied their personal healer there the other night. He’s in the best of hands right now, I guess.”

“And you’re going down because...?”

She took a few shaky breaths, and when she spoke again, her voice was strained. “Remember when I... _hurt_ Kaldur?”

He flinched - she’d told him about the incident on the Manta Flyer, when they’d gone to rescue their kidnapped freshmen, much later, after her kidnappers (Artemis, he’d realized, reading the mission report, which made him feel marginally better about the odds that M’gann had actually been in danger) had released her. As happy as he was that she’d finally figured out the consequences of her psychic abuses, that it had come at Kaldur’s expense was unsettling at best. “Yeah,” he prompted slowly after a second’s silence.

“Well,” she said, her voice dropping off in volume. “...Garth contacted Dick. Apparently when Kaldur’s awake, he’s delirious, and more or less unable to tell dreams from reality. He keeps muttering the Atlantean words for _punishment_ and _afterlife_ and _the gods_ , and not a whole lot else is distinguishable since he’s so weak, but Dick thinks - and I think I agree with him, maybe - that it might be at least in part residual damage from...what I did to him.”

The news was like a punch to the stomach - if anyone _didn’t_ deserve that kind of suffering, it was Kaldur. “So you’re going to, what? Go fix it?”

“Try to,” M’gann said, uncertain. “I have to try. I... I feel like this is my fault, Conner.”

_Join the club_ , he thought unhappily, shifting the phone. “And anyway,” she continued, a quiet, unmistakable fear threading her tone, “I think we all can agree that we’d prefer if one of us was there to stand guard in case... In case something happens, and I’m the only one who really _can_.”

“Can’t La’gaan go? He’s actually _from_ Atlantis. He’d understand the threat better than anybody.”

“No,” M’gann said, a little too quickly. “He.. He can’t know where Kaldur is, Conner. He just can’t.”

The fear in her voice had grown too strong to ignore. “M’gann, what did he do,” Conner asked carefully, trying to shove down on the protective anger welling up inside him.

“He... He’s just angry,” she whispered. “But that was enough, Conner, I’ve never had someone’s emotions _hurt_ me before.”

“Do you want me to come back,” he asked, pushing himself to the edge of the hay bale, his work boots flat on the weathered wood.

“No, stay with Ma and Pa,” she sighed. “I’m leaving in like, six hours anyway, and I don’t think you beating La’gaan to a pulp is going to solve anything.”

“It’d make me feel better,” he grumbled without much heat, and M’gann rewarded him with a soft laugh.

“And I do love that about you. But I’ll be fine. I’m staying with Zatanna now, and I’ll be out of range before the end of the day. I really just called to warn you that I’m leaving, and I’m not sure when I’ll be coming back to the surface.”

Conner tapped the corner of the tablet against his thigh with his free hand. “Okay. Tell Sha’lain’a I said hello?”

“If you’ll give my love to Ma and Pa,” she said, and the smile in her voice eased the anxious knot that had tied itself in his chest. “I love you.”

“I love you too. Take care of Kaldur,” he said solemnly, his head bowed.

She paused for a second. “I’ll do my best,” she said quietly, before hanging up.

* * *

Gar walked her to the zeta tubes, picking nervously at the hem of one sleeve. “Are you sure this is going to be okay,” he asked carefully.

M’gann sighed. “Depends on what you mean by _okay_ , I guess. Am I going to be safe? I’m pretty sure. Is Kaldur going to recover? I have no idea.”

“But...” Gar began, and one long canine hooked over his bottom lip as he searched for words. “You were...off, after what happened, and after they kidnapped you. I can’t explain it, but I don’t want that to happen again.” He shrugged awkwardly, his shoulders staying tucked up by his ears. “I don’t want to lose you too, okay?”

“Oh, Gar,” M’gann sighed, slowing to a stop and pulling the boy into a hug. He tucked his forehead against her shoulder and clung, and she pressed her cheek against his temple and threaded her fingers through his hair. “You’re not going to lose me, okay? Not this time, I can promise you that. And you’ve met Tempest, right?”

Gar sniffed and lifted his head a fraction of an inch. “For like two minutes,” he muttered. “Please tell me he’s less of an asshole than La’gaan is right now.”

“Hey,” M’gann chided. “Don’t say things like that, it’s rude.”

“He _is_ , though. I don’t know what the heck his deal is.”

Her arm still over Gar’s shoulders, M’gann resumed their trek toward the zeta tubes. “Rude has nothing to do with whether or not the other person deserves it,” she said, and cracked a smile when he rolled his eyes. “And don’t think this gives you a pass, but...I kind of agree with you. It’s very complicated, and I’d prefer you just stayed away from La’gaan for now. But Garth is... Better. Still upset for a lot of the same reasons, but he’s better than La’gaan is right now. And he’s one of the strongest sorcerers I know, and he’s going to be on guard. Nothing’s going to happen to me while he’s around.”

“I’m gonna hold him to that,” Gar muttered, tucked against M’gann’s side with one arm around her waist. “I’m serious, I’ll go all colossal squid on his butt, just you watch.”

“You’ve never _seen_ a colossal squid,” M’gann laughed. “No one from the surface has. In over a hundred years, there’s been thirty seconds of shaky, dimly lit video that doesn’t even catch the whole thing.”

“It could be enough,” Gar argued, his smile returning. “Just wait, I’m gonna practice, and I’ll totally be able to turn into one by the time you get back!”

M’gann laughed and ruffled his hair. “If it’ll keep you out of trouble while I’m gone,” she teased, hopping up the steps in front of the zeta tubes where Aquaman was waiting. Due to some early unfortunate mishaps, any zeta travel _to_ Atlantis required Aquaman’s authorization code, even with a League or Team ID scan. She ducked to kiss the top of Gar’s head and gave him a soft smile. “Be good, okay? You know how to get in touch if you need to.”

“Mmhm,” he said, attempting a reassuring smile. “You’ll give my message to Kaldur?”

“Of course. I love you.”

“Love you too, sis.” He gave Aquaman a small wave as he retreated a couple steps back. Aquaman nodded at him before turning to M’gann.

“Are you ready?”

She took a deep breath, the sides of her neck tingling as gills opened under the hinges of her jaw. “As I’ll ever be,” she said with a brave smile.

“Queen Mera will meet you and escort you from the palace. I will,” he said, and paused, looking oddly uncomfortable, “visit when I am able. I fear the presence of the king at one particular house too often may draw attention, and my wife is...far less recognizable outside Poseidonis.”

“I’m sure Kaldur understands.” M’gann watched him key in his authorization code and took a step toward the zeta tubes. “Is there...anything else I should be aware of, before I go?”

Aquaman looked pensive. “Just be careful,” he said finally, his tone grave. Ice started to form in the pit of M’gann’s stomach. “There are many who...share La’gaan’s anger.”

Psychically, M’gann curled in on herself, her mental reach shrinking back from the other presences around the mission room. “I understand,” she said quietly, stepping into the field of the ID scanner.

“Miss Martian, B05,” the computer said, sounding almost bored with the proceedings. M’gann took a deep breath and held it as the Watchtower dissolved in a shower of gold particles. The sudden transition to being immersed in water was an oddly familiar shock, and she coughed as she swam out of the zeta tube in the Atlantean palace, trying to kickstart her gills.

“Miss Martian,” someone said, and she turned to find a woman roughly Black Canary’s age, with hair as red as her own. “Are you alright?”

M’gann smiled, a little embarrassed. “Just fine, Queen Mera. The transition from air to water always gets me. It’s good to see you again.”

Mera returned her smile with a gracious incline of her head. “And you, Miss Martian, though the circumstances leave much to be desired.”

“How is he,” M’gann asked quietly, chewing her lower lip.

“The infection is beginning to heal,” she said, leading M’gann forward out of the corridor and toward a little-used side entrance. “The fever is lessening, but slowly, and his mind refuses to clear. My healer remains with him, as does Garth, but we are hopeful that you may be able to help heal him where we cannot.”

As if she could get any more self-conscious, she thought. “I’ll do everything I can,” she said cautiously, “but the mind is a...a complicated place, and Kaldur’s mind more so than many. There has already been so much damage... I don’t know if _anyone_ can put him back together again.”

Mera gave M’gann’s shoulder a small squeeze. “When he came home, during his tenure as Aqualad and as your team leader,” she began carefully, “he would...occasionally come to me, to seek advice. He spoke often of you, of your capabilities, and all the progress you had made. He was...very fond of you, I believe, more so than perhaps some of the others. Proud of the hero you have become. If he were coherent, I feel that he would have no hesitation about your ability to help, and so neither do I.”

“He talked about me? To you?”

She smiled, leading her guest over a disused path from the palace to the outskirts of Poseidonis. “He did. Most often in search of advice, ways to help your training, even though he possessed none of your gifts.”

At the word _gifts_ , M’gann cringed. “They’re more curses than anything, right now,” she mumbled, rubbing at her forearm. “Lately, all I seem capable of doing is more damage.”

Mera looked thoughtful. “I see,” she said carefully. “In my combat sorcery classes, there is a moment for most of my students - indeed, I worry when there _isn’t_ \- but for many, there is a moment when the student finally discovers not only the destructive potential of sorcery, but the destructive potential of _themselves_. Usually it happens right around the first time they injure someone when sparring, but sometimes it’s as simple as discovering how to boil the water around a school of fish, or some other spell that seems rather innocuous to an experienced sorcerer, but in that moment, they are suddenly confronted with the knowledge that they not only are capable of _terrible_ things, but that in many cases, these things actually come easily. They can be rationalized, or the consequences disregarded. There is no other course of study that requires as much coaxing to keep students from dropping it altogether.”

“Seriously?”

Mera nodded. “I do not know much about what you do, M’gann,” she said gently, “but I know what it is to be confronted with my own power for destruction. The fact that you call such a thing a ‘curse’ alone tells me there is more than enough good in you to create a balance.” She hummed thoughtfully and led M’gann out of the outskirts of Poseidonis and into the open expanse of the ocean floor. “Perhaps this is an opportunity not only for Kaldur to heal, but you as well. To remind yourself that you are capable of repairing damage, just as you are capable of being its cause.”

“That...actually makes me feel a lot better,” M’gann said after a moment. “How did you know I needed to hear that?”

“I have been a teacher for many, many years,” Mera replied with a wry smile. “Being an excellent judge of character is simply part of my job description.”


	11. Chapter 11

Even in death, Kaldur wondered at the distinction between reality and dreams.

Did the dead still dream? Or was the change of venue for his interviews with the gods merely them exercising their pleasure over the landscape of the afterworld, drawing him to a facsimile of his childhood bedroom, or simply changing his surroundings with nothing more than a thought? He had wandered the ruins of Poseidonis often in his dreams while he was alive - sometimes mere minutes after some great catastrophe, broken corpses and rubble strewn about, and sometimes centuries or millennia in the future, the skeletons of the dead eaten away and the sharp edges of the debris worn smooth by time and water. Were his living dreams now the landscape for his eternity? Kaldur rounded a fallen column and found himself glancing around for any god that might decide they wanted to speak to him here, his face heating up. For his own sake, he hoped that wasn’t the case, or that certain dreams could be left alone until he’d had a chance to get used to the concept of being dead.

He didn’t think he could handle seeing Roy as a figment of his imagination so soon, and if, by some miracle, the gods didn’t know about that particular facet of him, outing himself here might still be a straight shot to the deepest pit on the ocean floor.

In the silence, Kaldur thought he heard a voice, muffled by distance and the water around him. He paused in his ascent of a set of crumbling stone stairs, turning to look for the source. The ruins around him were lifeless, only the faintest of currents pulling through the deserted city.

“Kaldur?” There it was again, closer this time. Slowly, he made his way back down to the remains of a street. Surely the gods had no need to call to him in order to find him, and in all his exploring, he’d found no one else here.

Cautiously, he made his way in the direction of the voice. “Hello,” he called back uncertainly, swimming through what had once been a small amphitheater.

“Kaldur,” the voice - a girl, someone he _knew_ , even if her name remained frustratingly out of reach - called, sounding relieved. In front of him, something darted around a corner and barrelled into him before he had a chance to swim out of the way. Arms wrapped around his torso, and a head of red hair tucked itself under his chin. “I’m so glad you’re okay!”

He wrapped his arms around her slowly, trying to puzzle out what was going on. “M’gann,” he asked - it _felt_ like that was her name, as clouded as his recent memories were becoming, but why would she be _here_ , in what likely amounted to an Atlanteans-only afterlife? “M’gann,” he repeated, stronger, worry straining his tone, “what happened? Why are you--? What did you _do_?”

She let him go with less enthusiasm than she’d shown tackling him in the hug, absorbing his earlier confusion as she pulled back slowly. “What did _I_...? Kaldur...where do you think we are right now?”

“Awaiting judgement,” he said, trying to be as gentle as possible. Could it be that she didn’t _know_ she had joined him in death? “The gods...”

“I don’t understand,” she said carefully, her hold on him shifting from his arms to each of his hands.

“M’gann,” Kaldur said, feeling a little desperate. “Why are you _here_?”

“I’m here to help you,” she said, pulling him toward the top row of seating in the amphitheater. “You were hurt very badly, but--”

“I know,” he soothed, “but it’s okay. I’m okay here.”

M’gann blinked, stalling out. “...What?”

“It was my time,” he said gently. “But what brought _you_ here? Why would _my_ gods be judging _you?_ ”

She shook her head. “Wait, wait. Start from the beginning. _To you_ , where are we?”

“The afterlife,” Kaldur said, feeling a little less sure of himself. “I bled out on the sub I stole from Black Manta, to disable the weapon it carried. I...am not certain, but I believe someone discovered me before I passed. Someone I knew, although I was...very weak, by that point, and I cannot say for sure. They knew me, I believe, I remember someone saying my name. Do you know if I was brought back for... for burial?”

“Oh no,” M’gann said, her voice small. She pressed one hand to her mouth, looking dazed. “You think you’re dead?”

“I _am_. My injuries were severe, and the gods have already spent... I know not how long, attempting to decide what to do with me. My sentence has already been delayed, though by what, I cannot say.”

“Oh, _hello_ Megan, _that’s_ why he’s not regaining consciousness,” M’gann muttered. “Kaldur, listen to me. _Neither_ of us is dead right now. The person who found you in the sub was _Garth_. He brought you back to Shayeris, to your mother. You’ve been here the whole time, and you haven’t died yet, but you _are_ hanging on by a thread right now.”

Reeling, Kaldur sank to the top row of cracked amphitheater seats, grown over in places by small patches of coral on the slope below him. “What are you saying,” he asked, his voice faint.

She knelt before him, taking his hands in hers. “This isn’t the afterlife, Kaldur,” she said gently, something heartbroken lurking at the corners of her eyes even as she stroked her thumbs over the backs of his hands and gave him a small smile. “This is you, the inside of your mind. Your body wants to heal, wants you to be awake and whole again, but you’re so convinced that you’re already dead...”

Kaldur took a small, controlled breath, and felt an echo of pain course through his side. He frowned at it, and M’gann’s grip tightened around his fingers. “...Was Black Manta defeated?”

She looked up at him sadly, and apprehension dug its claws into Kaldur’s stomach. “Of course he was,” she said, and he breathed a small sigh of relief. “Artemis is fine, everyone else is fine, you were our only casualty.”

“Then my work is done,” Kaldur said softly. “M’gann, if what you say is true, perhaps it is best if--”

“No,” she snapped, a few decibels short of shouting. The word rippled down into the amphitheater, and Kaldur flinched, startled by it. For a long moment, all either seemed capable of was staring at the other. Fear and anger and grief warred on her face, and her grip on his hands became uncomfortable, but he remained silent, stunned by the force of her reaction. After a minute, she let go of his hands in favor of burying her face in her own. “Oh, this is what I was afraid of. This is all my fault.”

Carefully, Kaldur pulled her up to sit next to him and folded her in a hug, cradling her against his shoulder. “Shhh, it is not,” he murmured. “You have already atoned for what you’ve done. You are forgiven, M’gann, know that, please.”

She clung to him, hugging back with a desperate force that surprised him. “This is not better,” she insisted, her voice unstable even with the force it carried. “You don’t-- You don’t deserve to _die_ , Kaldur, how can you even _say_ that?”

Unable to think of a response, Kaldur stayed quiet, one hand stroking up and down her spine. She took a deep breath and tucked her forehead just below his gills. “I’ve been so afraid,” she said finally, her voice soft and heartbroken, “that because of what _I_ had done, you might have forgotten how much we love you, and need you, and want you to come home, and that you might have...tried to die on purpose.” Kaldur winced.

“There is...much you don’t know, M’gann, but know that this isn’t your doing. I believe this to be the best course, as painful as it may be.”

She hugged him tighter. “Stop,” she begged, like it was all she could manage not to burst into tears. “I know about Poseidonis, and I know about La’gaan, and I know about everything else from the mission log we recovered, and _I don’t care_ , Kaldur, I am _never_ going to care, I will always want you _home_ , and I’m not the only one, I _promise_. There is no world where you being dead is _better_ for any of us. And I know you’re going to say it’d be _easier_ , that no one would have to deal with a trial or whatever else might happen, but I don’t _want_ easier, I _want my brother back_.”

A wash of sadness overcame him, although how much was his own and how much belonged to her presence in his mind, he couldn’t say. His arms tightened around her back, and he tucked his face against her hair. “I am so sorry,” he whispered. “M’gann, I am _so_ , so sorry.”

“Just come _home_ ,” she sobbed against his shoulder. “ _Please_ , come home.”

After a few minutes of sniffle-filled silence between them, Kaldur scrubbed a hand over his face. “I do not know if I _can_ return,” he told her. “I fear I do not have the strength to stay, even if I possessed the desire. If I am as injured as you say...”

“Queen Mera is here,” she said, “and another woman named La’ani, a healer from the palace. Orin sent them both down here. You’re in _really_ good hands, Kaldur, and if you just let yourself recover, I think... I think it’ll be okay?”

He blinked. “I know La’ani,” he murmured. “She... She should be caring for Mera’s child, not me.”

“But she’s _here_ , because you’re important enough to save,” M’gann insisted. She peeled herself off his shoulder and cleared her throat, pressing her hands against her face. “I, um. I brought something for you,” she said quietly. “May I?”

Dumbly, he nodded, and she took his hand again. In an instant, the ruins of Poseidonis vanished, replaced instead by the garden on the Watchtower.

Garfield stood before them, bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet. “He’s grown,” Kaldur murmured. “He is almost as tall as you, now.”

“He is,” M’gann agreed. “Just, um. Watch.”

“You ready,” he asked, and disembodied, M’gann’s voice replied to the affirmative.

“Just pretend I’m him,” her voice said, gentle even with the weight of worry it carried.

Gar cleared his throat, and then, it appeared, looked directly at Kaldur. “H-hey, Kaldur,” he started haltingly, giving the space they occupied an awkward smile and wave. “Um. Man, this is weird. Are you sure you can’t like, shapeshift or something?”

“Not without distorting the memory, sorry. We don’t necessarily have to do this, it’s okay.”

He sighed. “No, I’m good. Uh. Take two?”

A disembodied chuckle met his attempted joke, and he smiled before dropping back into thoughtfulness. “So, um. Kaldur. I know you’re not doin’ so hot right now, apparently, and I just-- I _really_ don’t want the last thing I ever said to you to be like, calling you a traitor or pestering you about whale dialects or accusing you of eating the last fudge pop, because that’s the last conversation I can really _remember_ having with you, which makes no sense because you don’t even _like_ fudge pops so I have zero clue why my first impulse wouldn’t have been to blame Wally instead of you, but-- Um. Anyway. I-if you don’t, um, make it, I just wanted you to...”

He paused and sucked in a slow, deep breath. “Man, public speaking really isn’t my forte, even when it’s just in my head. Um. I wanted to tell you that... Having you around, even for the short time we actually got to spend with each other - you know, comparatively speaking - but you taught me a _ton_ , and I really wish we’d gotten to know each other better, because... You know, I still ask myself, _what would Kaldur do_ , which is ridiculous because I know you probably the least of anyone who was here when you left, and most of the time I have _no idea_ what Kaldur would do, but-- We miss you, Kaldur. Okay, maybe not _all_ of us, there are a bunch of freshmen who don’t even remember you as anything _but_ Black Manta’s second in command, but like. Everyone that _matters_ misses you, and-- Okay, that was kind of mean, I take that back. But you know what I mean, right? You still-- We don’t blame you, for what you had to do. We still want you back, okay? And I don’t know if... If this’ll affect anything, or heck, if you even _remember_ me, it’s been like almost a year and I was pretty annoying, let’s be real, you may have just like, repressed me entirely and I totally wouldn’t blame you, but... If it _does_. I-- I don’t know. Just...” He looked up from where his gaze had fallen to the grass underfoot, his eyes huge and sad. “Don’t stop fighting, okay? People still need you up here. I... I know I do.”

He fell silent, and Kaldur heard a faint echo of M’gann asking “Is that okay, or do you want to try again?” before the memory faded, leaving them back in the ruins of the amphitheater. “See,” M’gann asked softly, looking at him with a plaintive expression. “I’m not the only one who needs you to come back, Kaldur.”

He pulled her into another hug, less desperate than the first. “You would be enough,” he told her gently. “If it were a matter of willpower, you would be more than enough.” 


	12. Chapter 12

Of the ever-fluctuating list of people Roy really didn’t want to deal with, Wally currently held the top of the list. Considering what Roy knew to be true about the universe and its terrible sense of humor regarding him and his, he should have been in no way surprised to meet him in the stairs of Dinah’s building. He took a deep breath just before Wally noticed him several steps behind, and stuffed his hands in his pockets to maintain the illusion of civility. “Well, I’m picking up a toddler,” he quipped, “don’t know why you’re here.”

Wally pulled open the door on the 8th floor landing and held it open, gesturing for him to pass. “Play date,” he said, following Roy into the hall. “Dropped Artemis off this morning so she could hang out with her niece.” He cleared his throat and shoved his hands awkwardly into his pockets. “She thought she might hear something faster if she were hanging out with Dinah, rather than sitting at home.”

Roy pressed his lips together. If he hadn’t had mandatory overtime, he likely would’ve done the same thing. “And?”

“And what?”

“You know damn well ‘and what’,” Roy snapped, lowering his voice and boxing Wally in against the wall.

Wally rolled his eyes. “M’gann left yesterday to go down to Shayeris, I haven’t heard anything since. You wanna stay in the loop so bad, get your own comm.”

Bristling at his flippant tone, Roy grabbed Wally’s arm and dragged him back when he tried to brush past him toward Dinah’s door. “You know, you could maybe stand to give a _little_ more of a fuck about what happens to him.”

“Look,” Wally sighed, rolling his shoulder to shake off Roy’s grip. “Honestly, I have enough on my plate without this _will he, won’t he_ bullshit. My best friend’s off the deep end, my girlfriend is maybe not far behind him, and I’m now clawing my way through a four day backlog of other shit that piled up while I was trying to keep the two of them from _losing_ it. If he makes it, awesome; if he kicks it, I will grieve _then_. I’m not going to sit around waiting for the other shoe to drop, I have shit to do.”

Stunned, Roy let him brush past. “How the hell can you even _say_ that,” he demanded, following a pace behind. “He was your teammate, your _leader!”_

“Yeah, _was_ ,” Wally sighed. “We were never close, okay? And people die in this line of work all the time, that’s why Artemis and I _got out_. Sometimes you just have to accept there’s nothing you can do and move on. I know it’s harsh, but it’s the reality of the job. I would’ve thought you’d be familiar with that by now.”

“So what, you’re saying we should all just forget about him, move on with our lives? Is that it? You couldn’t even bring yourself to admit to me that he even still _existed_. He doesn’t deserve that from you, Wally, after _everything_ he did for the team.”

Wally turned, a sharp, calculating look on his face. “God, what is up with you and your exes, man,” he asked, and Roy’s planned argument died a swift and merciless death on his tongue. Wally turned back to the door and knocked, and Roy swore he saw a flicker of a bitter, victorious smirk cross his face.

“You’re late, and you’re early,” Dinah said when she opened the door, pointing first at Roy and then at Wally. “We’re watching Mulan, you might want to just hang out for a minute.” She let the pair into the entryway of her apartment and gave both of them a quick, critical once-over before heading back to the living room. Not for the first time, Roy wondered if she wasn’t secretly telepathic, or had super hearing to go with the super yelling.

Reluctant to abandon the argument, Roy cast one last dirty look at Wally and followed her to the couch. On Dinah’s flat screen, Mulan was tugging on the reins and jumping her horse down the palace steps, into the adoring crowd of Chinese citizens. “Damn, missed the good part,” he said, bracing his hip against the side of the couch behind Artemis’s head.

She craned her neck to look up at him and held a finger to her lips. Lian was curled in a ball on top of her, small downy head tucked under Artemis’s chin. “We’re having a moment, don’t fuck it up,” she whispered, and Roy cracked a grin, sidestepping to fold his arms on the back of the couch.

“You heard from Dick today?”

Artemis’s mouth pulled to one side as she shook her head. “Nothing. He said he’d call me as soon as M’gann checked in, so either there were complications, or he’s a liar.”

“Both are possible,” Roy agreed unhappily. On the screen, Mulan was presenting her gifts from the emperor to her father, and Roy glanced down at his daughter and smiled. “Have fun today?”

She smoothed her palm over Lian’s back with a soft, affectionate look. “Yeah, this was good. I haven’t seen her since she was the size of my forearm. She’s very interested in how paper tastes right now, apparently.

Roy grinned. “Oh, you should’ve seen her when she figured out she had _toes_ , it was hilarious. She’d just roll around on the living room floor for literally _hours,_ trying to get them into her mouth. Actually had to move the coffee table so she wouldn’t roll into it and suffer some sort of brain injury.”

Artemis grinned back for a second, before her smile turned sad again. “Wish I’d been around,” she sighed.

Roy cast a glance at the kitchen, where he could just make out Wally and Dinah talking under the dialog of the movie. “Well,” he said, reaching over the back of the couch to stroke his thumb over the top of Lian’s head, “you’re here now.”

She took a slow, deep breath and nodded. “Yeah. I wouldn’t mind doing this again.”

“If you think you can handle it, my regular sitter is out for the next three weeks, knee surgery or something I think, if you’d be interested in just cutting out the middle man?” He glanced at her walking cast. “You’re mobile enough to handle a toddler, right?” Artemis gave him a flat look, and he raised a hand in surrender. “Simple question, jesus.”

“I have a follow-up appointment tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll get the cast off then,” she said, craning her neck to look past his shoulder and into the kitchen before lowering her voice and looking up at him with a dire expression. “I am _so_ ready to be done with this, I am never breaking a bone ever again. I’m going nuts, Roy. I’m _fantasizing_ about _jogging_.”

He chuckled. “Which is saying something, considering how much you despise running.”

“I know, it’s terrible! I’m hoping it’s a side effect of the medication.”

Lian stirred on her chest, and a strand of loose blond hair got caught in her mouth when she gave a wide yawn. “Oh, let’s not, thanks,” Artemis murmured, peeling the now-damp lock out of her niece’s mouth. Lian made a small, sleepy noise and tried to push herself upright. “Well, good morning,” she teased, “look who slept right through the movie.”

Artemis lifted Lian to sit up on her stomach, turned to face the back of the couch. She blinked owlishly, disoriented, and Roy reached out and tapped the tip of her nose with his index finger. “Hi, baby bug,” he laughed when she babbled something unintelligible up at him. “What do you think, is it time to let Aunt Dinah have her house back?”

“Always happy to have her,” Dinah said, padding up behind him. “She’s a good way to waste a day off.”

“I’ll remember that when she’s fifteen and driving me crazy,” Roy warned, sliding his hands under Lian’s arms and lifting her off Artemis’s stomach. “Diaper bag?”

“My bedroom, I’ll get it,” Dinah said, resting a hand on his shoulder before vanishing down the short hallway. Artemis levered herself to her feet, reaching out over the couch to use Roy’s shoulder for balance. The other hand shot out in the direction of the kitchen, palm out to keep Wally from zipping over.

“So what time do you want to bring her over on Monday?”

Roy shrugged, cradling Lian in the crook of his arm. She latched one tiny hand onto the collar of his t-shirt. “I have to be at work by eight,” he said. “You guys are still in Palo Alto, yeah?”

“Mmhm. I could meet you at the zeta tube at like, seven thirty, make the hand off a little easier?”

“Sounds good to me. What do you think, bug?” Lian babbled something happy and meaningless and Roy grinned. “She’s cool with it.”

Artemis smiled, bracing her hip against the back of the couch. “You’re shockingly a halfway decent dad, Harper. Never would’ve seen that one coming.”

“You and me both,” he said solemnly. Dinah came back with Lian’s bag and he hooked it over his shoulder. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, and grinned when she gave him a stern look.

“Don’t you start with me,” she warned.

“Hey, you can’t kick my ass, I have a baby shield,” he laughed, but still took a step backwards toward Artemis. “Seriously, thank you for taking her today, I know it was really last minute.”

“Like I said, I always love having her. We had fun.”

Roy returned her smile and turned to give Artemis a one-armed hug. “Call me if you hear anything, okay,” he muttered, “god knows I can’t trust Wally right now.”

“Of course,” she murmured, hugging him back and kissing Lian’s forehead. “Goodnight, kiddo, I’ll see you Monday.”

Roy adjusted the shoulder strap of Lian’s diaper bag and headed for the front door. Wally came out of the kitchen as he passed, holding a soda and looking like he wanted to say something. “Save it,” Roy muttered as he passed, and left the apartment before Wally had a chance to say another word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yyyeah, just because Wally didn't die, doesn't mean I don't still think he's a dick.


	13. Chapter 13

It was another day before Kaldur woke again. 

Miss Martian had spent close to an hour with him, eyes glowing soft and unblinking in the dim space of his room, before inhaling and slumping away from him. She had been silent for a long time after that, unable or unwilling to speak until she and Garth had joined Sha’lain’a and Calvin for dinner. “I don’t believe he’s in pain,” she had begun, halting and troubled, “but... I was able to learn the reason he was so agitated when he was awake.”

Calvin had leaned forward, apparently eager for something they could  _ do _ . The constant waiting had been grating on him perhaps more than anybody. Miss Martian had bowed her head, unable to meet his gaze. “He... When he was injured on the Manta sub, his brain had convinced itself that he had... That his loss of consciousness was loss of  _ life _ .” She had pressed her lips together, searching for the words she wanted. “Normally, the... The mind has ways of convincing someone of the truth of what they see, hear, feel, and so on. The sensation of  _ dying  _ isn’t unusual, actually, with injuries like his, but normally when they wake up... There’s only a few minutes of disorientation before the brain figures out what’s going on.” Shame had crept over her features then, and her audience had exchanged puzzled glances. “I... I’m afraid that Kaldur and I had a... A run-in, while he was still undercover, and long story short, I accidentally neglected to repair that part of his mind. That damage, combined with the fever from the infection and his own...stubbornness, for lack of a better word, was enough to convince his brain that it wasn’t  _ supposed  _ to be awake, or even alive. Which...is why he was so distressed.”

Sha’lain’a had been troubled, and Calvin had immediately wanted to know if the damage could be repaired. Hastily, Miss Martian had assured them that it could, and it had, though she would of course go back to make sure what she had fixed in Kaldur’s mind would stay that way. “I think, now that he’s aware that he isn’t  _ dead _ , he should wake up on his own but... I could be wrong, honestly. Time will tell, I guess.”

She’d spent much of the next day resting - from what she’d told Garth, such finicky, extended mental contact was quite exhausting - and Garth had spent it sitting where she had, alternating between watching Kaldur’s face anxiously and reading the same line over and over in the class reading he’d been putting off. It would be another few days before either king or queen could make an excuse to come visit, but with every minute that ticked away, Garth’s hopes that Kaldur would wake up before then drained away. He looked down at the text in his hands, snorting a bitter laugh as he looked away from Kaldur’s face - at this point, just peaceful, uninterrupted sleep could be considered an improvement, over the restless terror that had gripped him. They seemed to be scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of small favors.

Kaldur’s breath hitched, just a little, and Garth’s head snapped up again. His eyelids fluttered, revealing grey eyes that no one but Miss Martian had seen in almost four days now. Garth shifted forward, his heart leaping higher in his chest. “Kaldur?”

He made a soft, unintelligible sound and rolled his head toward Garth’s voice, squinting at him like he couldn’t quite comprehend what he was seeing. His heart made one final leap up into his throat, and Garth darted for the bedroom door. “Miss Martian,” he called, not pausing to see if she had heard him before hastening back to Kaldur’s side.

In a minute, she was in the doorway, red hair floating around her ears in the sudden swirl of water left by Garth’s abrupt movements. Her eyes landed on Kaldur’s face, and she broke into a wide smile. “Kaldur,” she said brightly, swimming for his other side. “How are you feeling?”

Her answer came in a small, thready sigh. Kaldur blinked languidly up at them, still boneless against the bed. “Oh,  _ hello  _ Megan,” she muttered, laying one slim-fingered hand on his forehead. “He’s probably still too exhausted to speak. Here.”  _ Will this be easier, Kaldur? _

Garth jumped at the sudden voice inside his head. His gaze flickered from Miss Martian to Kaldur, trying to calm the sudden discomfort for his sake. Telepathy had never been his favorite concept, but if it allowed Kaldur to communicate, he could hold his own tongue about it.

When Kaldur’s thoughts echoed back across the telepathic link, they were jumbled and tired sounding, and Garth had never been more relieved to hear his friend’s voice, even if it wasn’t out loud.  _ Garth... You... Why? _

“Why what,” Garth said out loud. Try as he might, communicating telepathically himself was still too unsettling.

_ You found me... _

A small, irrational anger flared at Kaldur’s disbelief. In truth, he himself had gone over and over his actions, unable to find a motive that satisfied him beyond some belief that he owed Kaldur the chance to make his own explanations, however misguided that belief might be. “Of course I  _ found _ you,” he scoffed, instead of voicing his agreement with Kaldur’s apparent sentiments about him. “You honestly believed no one would follow you out there?”

_ You... Saving me...was not your duty... _

The truth of his own actions settled on Garth with a sudden, grave certainty. “It  _ was _ ,” he said, his voice soft and serious. “We are brothers, first and foremost, friends and allies second. Enemies, last of all.”

Wordless gratitude washed over the telepathic connection like a gentle tide. “I owed you my faith,” Garth said, propping his elbows on his knees, “and the chance to stand and speak on your own behalf, and I will do whatever I must to see that you have both.”

_ The easy path... Has never been your path of choice, my friend... _

Garth glanced at Miss Martian. She had told him, after Sha’lain’a and Calvin had gone to bed, of Kaldur’s attempt to convince her that letting him die would be the sensible thing to do. “Do not try to convince me that you would be better off dead,” he said sharply, the volume of his voice never wavering. “What’s done is done, and you will not be allowed to die now, not after the effort I have expended already.”

The corner of Kaldur’s mouth twitched upward.  _ Trust you...to be stubborn about this... _

Indignation rose in Garth’s throat, and he swallowed it back. “I will not argue with you,” he said flatly.

“Are you in pain,” Miss Martian asked, changing the subject.

Kaldur’s eyes slipped closed, and his gills fluttered as he exhaled.  _ Nothing I can’t handle... _

Miss Martian frowned. “That’s not what I asked, you’re just being stubborn.” Through the mind link, Garth felt something soft and warm that, if he didn’t know any better, he might have called love. Miss Martian relented, leaning over to press her lips against Kaldur’s temple. “I’m still telling La’ani to give you a higher dose,” she murmured gently. “There’s no reason for you to be in pain.”

Kaldur’s eyes drifted to Garth, like he half-expected him to object.  _ I’m not  _ cruel _ ,  _ he thought indignantly, forgetting about the telepathic link. Kaldur looked up at him sadly, blinking slowly.

_...not my intention... _

Garth winced. “I know,” he lied. He could feel Kaldur’s exhaustion weighing heavily against the telepathic link. “I will tell your mother that you were awake. She will be happy to hear it.”

Again, gratitude without words lapped up against his mind. “We’ll let you sleep now,” Miss Martian told him. “It was really good to see you awake.”

He gave her a ghost of a smile, and his eyes drifted closed again.

 

* * *

Jaime, Cassie, and Tim were loitering by Conner’s locker when he rounded the last row from the end of the Watchtower’s locker room. He’d been stubbornly avoiding coming back up for the duration of his official leave time - he’d taken ten days, the maximum any Leaguer could take off before the paperwork got forwarded to whoever was acting command for review - but moving farm equipment around for repairs just wasn’t the same as the full-body combat workout he could get in the simulator, and he was technically back on active duty in 12 hours. Might as well get back in the swing of things now, he’d figured, rather than waiting until the last minute.

Now, as the small cluster of freshmen turned to him, he was really starting to regret coming back up at all.

“H-hey, Conner,” Jaime said, grinning nervously at him. “How’s it goin’?”

“Fine,” Conner replied, using his body to shield his locker combination from view. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust these three specifically - Jaime was a good kid, Tim was conscientious to a fault, and Cassie’s heart was in the right place, even if she was a little excitable - but Jaime was Bart’s best friend, and Cassie had a tendency to blab just for the chance to be included, and the last thing he needed in his life was to be the butt of some asinine practical joke, like someone filling his locker with shaving cream or his boots with cream cheese.

Behind him, he heard Cassie’s shoes scuffle on the floor as she shifted from one foot to the other. Her hands brushed against each other as she wrung them, and Conner closed his eyes and took a deep, controlled breath.  _ Shut it off _ , he coached himself, filtering his sensory input and focusing only on the sounds he wanted to hear - the squeak of his locker door, the quiet, even tick of the second hand on his watch. He hung his backpack on one of the side hooks. “Do you three need something, or are you just gonna stand there and watch me get ready for the gym?”

Simultaneously, Jaime’s head tilted back as he memorized the ceiling, Cassie became suddenly invested in the pattern of her shoelaces, and Tim made a quarter turn and busied himself with studying the nameplates farther down the bank of lockers. “Sorry, sorry,” Jaime said quickly, rubbing the back of his head. “We just, um, well, we--”

“ Something  _ weird’s  _ going on,” Cassie blurted, head snapping up just as Conner pulled his shirt off. Her eyes went wide, her cheeks turning a spectacular, glowing pink, and she hurried to duck her head again. The reaction was so ridiculous, Conner almost wanted to laugh.

“ I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he said wryly, fishing a muscle shirt out of his gym bag, “but  _ weird  _ is par for the course around here. Gonna have to get a little more specific.”

Neither Cassie nor Jaime seemed to be able to quantify the apparent weirdness, so Tim stepped into the awkward silence. “Well,” he started, glancing at his comrades, squaring his shoulders like he was delivering a report to a senior member of the League. “We know that Kaldur... It’s been hard on you guys. The old guard, I mean. And we totally understand, but...”

Conner raised an eyebrow. “But what?”

“We just feel kinda out of the loop,” Jaime offered, looking distinctly uncomfortable.

“It just feels like there’s something big going on, and no one’s telling us anything,” Tim added.

“ I mean, we’re supposed to be a team, right? We’re  _ all  _ on the  _ same  _ team.”

Conner looked at Cassie, who met his gaze with a plaintive expression. He sighed, and sat down to untie his shoes. “How much  _ do  _ you know,” he asked, more focused on his laces than the freshmen.

“ We know Kaldur was missing, presumed dead,” Tim said, sounding relieved to be back into cold facts rather than the tangled mess that group dynamics had become. “We know that he was working undercover with Artemis, who faked  _ her  _ death in order to join him in his mission. We know that Aquaman called a meeting through official channels with the old guard, all of whom were on personal leave at the time. We know that...well, according to the zeta logs, you never actually showed, and La’gaan’s ID wasn’t even on the right floor of the Watchtower at the time of the meeting, although he’s been acting  _ really  _ strangely since it happened. And now Miss Martian is ‘on assignment’, although no official mission designation is listed in the League system, everyone else is  _ still  _ on personal leave, a bunch of people have actually filed extensions, and Beast Boy is now on personal leave, too. Staying with Martian Manhunter, apparently.”

“ And no matter who we ask,” Cassie added, folding her arms, “no one will tell us  _ anything _ .”

Conner blinked at the shoe in his hand. “That’s some...actually really scary detective work.”

“Thank you,” Tim said modestly.

Jaime hesitated before taking a seat next to Conner. “Look, man,” he said, turning his head over his shoulder to look at him. “If this is like, a  _ thing _ , you don’t have to tell us what’s going on. But can you just tell us if we should be worried? The last time people were all secretive on this team, things didn’t turn out so hot. Like, for anybody.”

“You’re telling me,” Conner muttered. He set his shoes in his locker and sighed. “Alright. First off, Kaldur is alive.”

“What,” Cassie exploded. Tim slapped a hand over her mouth, eyes widening in alarm behind his sunglasses.

“Yeah, that was about my reaction too.” Conner dragged a hand through his hair. “He’s in an...undisclosed location. Injured - recovering, but still very weak. La’gaan is not taking this well, hence the strange behavior.”

“Ohhh,” Jaime breathed. “That makes sense.”

“ Just because we understand why he’s upset, doesn’t mean he’s got a free pass to hurt people,” Conner cautioned. “He’s already done damage to Miss Martian. If you see him pick a fight with anyone - doesn’t matter who - you knock him out and file a formal complaint  _ immediately _ , got it?”

“ Whoa,” Cassie said, pulling Tim’s hand away from her face. “Is he like, gonna get voted off the island? Like, you guys kicked Arsenal off the team for endangering  _ us _ , is this gonna be the same deal?”

Conner dragged a hand over his face. “No, I don’t think so. It was...understandable, as much as I wanted to wring his neck regardless, and anyway we tend to work on a three strike system. Arsenal was  _ way  _ past his three strikes when we kicked him off.”

“Yeah,” Tim muttered. “Okay, that makes sense. So...where is Miss Martian?”

“ She’s in Atlantis, with Kaldur. Yeah, that’s the other thing -  _ no one _ knows where he is right now, got it? You have  _ no idea _ where he is, and you are  _ definitely _ not going to tell La’gaan.”

“ Gotcha,” Cassie said, almost comically serious. “Kaldur is definitely not anywhere underwater, where scary Atlanteans could get to him. Not at  _ all _ .”

Conner gave her a dry look. “Am I gonna regret telling you this?”

Her eyes went wide. “No! Come on, boss man, I’m trustworthy, I swear!”

He pointed at her, fighting a smile. “Never call me ‘boss man’ ever again.”

“Yeah,” she said, blushing all the way up to her ears.

“So what’s the game plan,” Jaime asked. “I mean, I dunno how I feel about this whole undercover thing, but Aqualad’s one of ours, right? We’re not gonna just leave him to get underwater lynched or something, are we?”

“Tempest and Miss Martian are on protection detail until he’s recovered enough to travel. I’m serious, we weren’t sure he was going to make it for a while.” Conner glanced up at Tim and Cassie - Tim looked faintly queasy at the thought of Kaldur’s brush with death. “Nightwing, Miss Martian, and Aquaman are working to figure out some way to get him back on land, without exposing his location to everyone looking to put his head on a stake right now.”

“ Well, can we  _ help _ ,” Cassie demanded. “Come  _ on _ , we’re useful, we could like, I dunno, create a diversion or something!”

Tim glanced at her, bemused. “Aside from the diversion idea, she has a point, Superboy. We’d like to help. And I know Bart and Virgil would feel the same, if they knew what we know about the situation.”

“We can help, ese,” Jaime said quietly. “Just give us something to do.”

Conner closed his eyes - he could practically hear a thirteen-year-old Robin saying something similar to Batman underneath a full moon, standing amid the ruins of Cadmus and an audience of almost the entire active Justice League. When he looked up, all three were staring at him. “Yeah, okay,” he sighed, sitting up straight. “Robin, I need you keep tabs on La’gaan. Wondergirl, stick close - if La’gaan tries to pick a fight with somebody, I need you to be ready to contain him.”

Cassie looked a little uneasy. “Contain him?”

“Keep him from hurting someone,” Conner clarified. “You’re just about the only one besides me or one of the League members who can go toe-to-toe with him when he’s angry. Blue, I need you to get in touch with Impulse and Static - be vague, but tell them the gist of what’s going on. See if they might be willing to help. Not sure how we might need them, but I’d like to know that they’re on board before anyone goes making plans that might fall apart if they say no.” “You got it,” Jaime said, nodding solemnly. “I’ll head over to Central and talk to Bart right now. Rob, can you figure out where Virgil is?”

“Sure. His comm’s got a passive GPS tracker, or failing that, I can hack his cell phone.”

“I say again,” Conner said warily. “That is some very scary detective work.”

Tim gave him another small smile. “Hey. I learned from the best, didn’t I?"

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So my regular unofficial beta sort of got a day job, so anything beyond this point is completely unbeta'd. Be ye warned and all that.


	14. Chapter 14

Roy couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on the Watchtower. 

Actually, he could, but he didn’t want to, so he tried his best not to think about it, filing paperwork with Captain Atom regarding his mission to bring the Original Speedy home. From start to present, the saga of Arsenal’s recovery, in all senses, had been tumultuous at best, and part of Roy still ached with the  _ what if _ ’ s of it all. What if he’d figured out what he was sooner? What if he’d gotten to Arsenal faster? What if he’d paid more attention after they did get him back, kept him from making contact, however violently, with Lex Luthor at all? Luckily for everyone, Arsenal had agreed to reserve duty and serious professional help before his PTSD and identity issues got himself or someone else killed, but Roy felt like he should be doing more to help him get back on his feet. It seemed to have become his mantra, lately - I should’ve done more for Roy, I should’ve done more for Artemis, I should’ve done more for Kaldur, I should’ve done more, more, more.

“Hey,” Artemis said, coming up behind him. “Wasn’t sure you were coming to this thing.”

Roy wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Dinah thought I might have ‘valuable input’, whatever that means, coming from her. Besides, I got sick of being out of the loop. How’re you feeling?”

She shot him a wry grin and bounced on her toes. “Slowly rediscovering my latent hatred of jogging - mostly I’m just thrilled I can walk without a limp again. You? How’s life on the home front?”

“Nothing to report.” He waved at Hawkman on monitor duty as he and Artemis started walking toward the conference rooms. “Left Lian with my neighbor for a few hours, in exchange for fixing her bathtub. Landlord’s too cheap for maintenance and she’s in grad school, plumbers are expensive as shit.”

“Aah, good to see the barter system is alive and well,” Artemis teased. The door slid open for them, and Roy gestured her through first. “Still need me to take her on Tuesday? I saw on the news this morning the zoo has new red panda cubs, I thought I might take her.”

“Red panda cubs, how subtle of you,” Roy returned, grinning. “Yeah, if you’re up for it. Monday’s a bank holiday so I’ll be home, but Tuesday it’s back to work.”

Aquaman was sitting at the head of the conference table, talking in low and serious tones with Dick over a tablet on the table between them. Aside from Batgirl, who had apparently just come off shift, and Aquaman, who probably just lived like that, no one was in uniform. Rocket nodded at Roy in welcome, and Zatanna gave him a little finger wave across the table before going back to cracking jokes at a nervous-looking Jaime. Roy slid his jacket off before sitting down next to Artemis and checking his phone.

“I can’t believe you get bars up here,” Artemis complained.

“WayneTech subsidiary,” Roy replied, wiggling his phone at her with a grin.

“Jackass,” she grumbled, and sat back in her chair. “I barely get T-Mobile at my house.”

At the head of the table, Dick cleared his throat. Chatter around the room muffled to a stop, and he glanced at Aquaman as if asking permission to head the meeting. “We had a report from Miss Martian this morning - Kaldur is doing much better than he was two weeks ago, but he’s still pretty weak, and tensions in Atlantis aren’t getting any better. Aquaman has stalled as long as possible, but Parliament is calling for an all-out manhunt. Miss Martian and the healer he sent out are both keeping an eye on him and agree he should be strong enough to move pretty soon, but definitely not strong enough to handle angry villagers with tridents and, uh, whatever the underwater equivalent of torches is.”

Zatanna coughed to cover an ungainly snort, and Aquaman spared Dick a dry, sideways glance before taking over. “Getting Kaldur’ahm to the surface will be a fairly straightforward, if dangerous, affair. Ideally, I will be accompanying Tempest and Miss Martian as they escort him out of Shayeris, but should I be unable, I trust them to see him safely to shore again.”

“Why can’t someone take the Bioship down,” Conner asked from the far corner of the table, where he’d been sitting with his arms folded. “We could get him out a lot faster if he didn’t have to be strong enough to swim two hours to the coast.”

“That was my first thought too,” Dick allowed, “but the Bioship would draw too much attention that close to a populated area.”

“Besides,” Batgirl added, leaning over the table to look at Conner, “the Bioship’s going to be integral to the next batch of missions lined up for the Team. It’d be at least another two weeks until we could free it up to make the trip, and like Dick said, it would attract too much attention.”

“There is a current that runs close to shore that can ease the stress of the journey,” Aquaman said. “I am not worried about getting Kaldur’ahm to the surface - what lies after, however, is another matter.”

“Artemis and I will be waiting to meet him,” Dick continued. Roy cast a glance at Artemis - apparently, this was news to her. Someday, Dick was going to meet up with the consequences of his Forgiveness Over Permission policy, and they were not going to be kind to him. “After that, we’ll escort him the rest of the way to the zeta tubes, and on up to the Watchtower.”

Roy frowned. “Hold on,” he said, and everyone turned to him. “Just to be clear, is the plan that he’ll stay  _ here _ , indefinitely?" 

Dick looked uncomfortable, and Aquaman braced his palms on the table. “Do you have an objection,” he asked, oddly even-tempered for a question that sounded like he was just daring Roy to say something stupid.

“ Yeah, actually,” Roy said, sitting forward. “So, the Atlantean parliament is trying to launch a full manhunt looking for Kaldur, as a terrorist and a traitor, right?” A collective wince seemed to ripple through the room. “If they get wind that the Justice League, of which their  _ monarch  _ is a charter member, is willfully harboring him? What if they go to the UN? Does the League have some sort of extradition treaty that we’d be violating? Like, all I’m saying, is A, how much of a shitstorm is this gonna cause, and B, how much of that shitstorm are  _ you  _ willing to deal with?”

Rocket raised an eyebrow at him across the table. “Man makes a good point. You got a better idea?”

Roy shrugged. “Why can’t an individual League member take him? Or shit, for that matter, someone on the Team? I mean, we’ve all got secret IDs for a reason, right? And that way the League gets plausible deniability if someone comes looking for him - what we do out of uniform really isn’t the League’s business.”

Artemis gave him an appraising little smile. “Well, look at you, thinking and everything.” 

“ I, for one, agree that setting Kaldur up with one of us would be better than him staying here,” Batgirl said. “Legality aside, after all he’s been through, I think that having him living essentially at the office would just encourage him to go back too quickly. I think the least we can do is extend him a quiet place to recover  _ fully _ .”

“Don’t you have room,” Dick asked, looking at Roy.

Aquaman folded his arms. “I am not sure that--”

“It’d be temporary,” Dick interrupted, ignoring Aquaman. “Just until he’s strong enough to be set up in his own place.”

Roy blinked. “Uh, how’d we make  _ that  _ leap?”

Zatanna glanced at Dick before leaning forward toward Roy. “Here, let me see if I still translate Bat-brain,” she said, and waved a hand when Dick made an indignant sound. “It’d make more sense for Kaldur to stay with a member or former member of the Team, if someone came looking - then we can play the personal loyalties card instead of assuming a larger conspiracy, and fewer people go down with us in a worst case scenario. Of all the members of the Team, most live with parents or here, on the Watchtower, which was the objection to begin with. That only leaves me, Dick, Artemis and Wally, you, and  _ maybe  _ Rocket.”

“No good, I move in three weeks, remember? My whole life’s in boxes, I can’t take him,” Rocket said.

Zatanna nodded. “Right, so - me, Dick, Artemis, and you. We  _ all  _ know you two have been close for years, longer than probably the rest of us have even known each other. Given the choices, who do you think  _ Kaldur  _ would pick?”

Roy fidgeted. “I don’t know - It’s been almost two years since I’ve even  _ talked  _ to him. I’m sure he’d rather stay somewhere else.”

Artemis gave him a skeptical look, but said nothing. Jaime lifted a hand hesitantly, glancing around the table. “You don’t have to raise your hand,” Conner told him helpfully. “Just spit it out.”

Jaime flushed and dropped his hand. “I mean, can’t we  _ ask  _ him? Send a message to Miss Martian, have her ask who he’d be more comfortable with?” He set his shoulders and looked around the table again. “He’s a grown man, why should we get to sit around deciding what’s best for him when we can just  _ ask _ ?”

Conner shrugged and pulled out his phone. “Good point. I’ll send M’gann a message about it and see what she says.”

Rocket gave Roy a look across the table. “Do  _ you  _ have any objections?”

Roy shrugged. “I can make space, especially if it’s not too long-term.”

She raised a knowing eyebrow at him. “Not what I asked.”

He gave her a flat look, fussing nervously with the zipper of his jacket as he slouched in his chair, and didn’t answer.

 


	15. Chapter 15

M’gann lounged against a crumbling railing on the roof of the Conservatory, her cheek resting on her folded arms. The streets of Poseidonis below were long-silent and peaceful, worn soft by eons of abandonment. “I like this better than bombed-out Poseidonis,” she told Kaldur idly. “I mean, I wish you felt better about yourself, but this isn’t awful.”

Kaldur rested one elbow on the railing next to her, following her gaze over his shoulder. “I am sorry you saw that,” he said softly.

“Oh, don’t be,” she sighed. She lifted her head and laid one hand on his forearm with a sad smile. “Honestly, I’m glad I was here to help. No one should ever be alone in that.”

Kaldur covered her hand with his own, but said nothing. M’gann shifted so her body was angled toward him, returning her head to where it had been pillowed on her elbow on the railing. “Thanks for letting me be here,” she whispered.

He smiled. “I’m afraid I am still too weak to stay awake for long. This is a pleasant compromise.”

“Yeah,” M’gann said, sitting up. She gave a small, humorless chuckle and ran a hand through her hair. “Much better than...”

“Much better than what?”

M’gann winced. “It’s... It’s nothing. I just had a...fight, with La’gaan. Before I left.”

Kaldur sat up. “What? What happened?”

She fidgeted awkwardly, unsure how much to say. “He...was angry, that we want to bring you home. I can’t figure out why, I just--” She shivered. “I’ve never had anyone _hurt_ me like that before.”

“Oh, M’gann,” Kaldur sighed. He held an arm out to her and caught her in a hug as she scooted into his chest. “Are you alright?”

“Better,” she said, resting her head on his shoulder. “Do _you_ know what’s going on with him? You’ve known La’gaan forever.”

Kaldur was quiet for a long moment. “La’gaan has always put a great deal of importance on loyalty,” he explained slowly, “and forgiveness, as many understand it, isn’t something that has been wise for him in the past. You must understand,” Kaldur said quickly, when M’gann started to argue, “in Atlantis, the Purists... If someone hurt you for being a White Martian, would you find it wise to forget what that person had done?”

M’gann curled into Kaldur’s side. “No, I wouldn’t,” she said quietly.

“After a while,” Kaldur continued, “remembering injuries becomes second-nature.” He sighed. “I understand why he is angry, and I believe it to be justified.”

“You were doing your _job_ ,” M’gann argued. “He has no reason to hate you for--”

“I betrayed him,” Kaldur emphasized slowly. “Whatever my intentions were. He has the right to be angry at me, M’gann, but he had no right to hurt anyone else.”

“I’m alright, no lasting damage. It was just scary.” Kaldur hummed and gave her a gentle squeeze. “We can talk about something else,” she offered, and Kaldur’s shoulders relaxed. “The team’s been trying to figure out how to get you back to the surface. Everyone’s eager to have you back.”

“How is...everyone?”

M’gann sat up. It was a question Kaldur very consciously avoided asking, but she’d felt it lingering on the edges for the past two weeks, surrounded by worry and an odd self-deprecating loneliness. “Everyone’s okay,” she said, pushing her hair away from her face. “Artemis just got a clean bill of health, Dick is back with the Team - he sort of fell off the map for a bit after you, well. Roy--”

Kaldur went rigid at Roy’s name, his eyes drifting away from her. M’gann fell silent - she’d been trying to work the question of Kaldur’s host preferences into conversation gradually, looking for an opening. Maybe this was the answer? Did he and Roy really have such a terrible falling out that they couldn’t stand each other now?

He shifted, still unwilling to meet her eye. “How is Roy,” he asked quietly.

“He’s okay,” M’gann said slowly. “Did you hear that he found Speedy?”

“I did,” Kaldur managed, with a small, distracted smile. “I am relieved his search is over now.”

“He’s, ah. He’s helping us figure out how to get you back.”

At last, Kaldur met her eye again. “What? He’s--”

A swell of nervous disbelief swirled around M’gann’s senses. She breathed in the feeling, trying to sort through it all - guilt, sadness, disbelief and hope muddying each other. Underneath it all, an aching loneliness in the shape of love, like a phantom limb long since amputated. M’gann inhaled slowly, blinking back tears. “Yeah,” she murmured, taking Kaldur’s hand. “He’s very worried about you.”

Kaldur shook his head. “That’s... Impossible, he...”

M’gann bit her lip. The question she needed to ask - _would you be comfortable staying with Roy?_ \- sat on the tip of her tongue. Maybe Kaldur’s reaction told her everything she needed to know. “We can talk about something else,” she offered quietly.

He took a slow breath and squeezed M’gann’s hand. “Please,” he managed.

* * *

Batgirl caught Conner’s eye when he came through the zeta tubes. “La’gaan,” he asked, setting a bag of equipment from the Bioship down on the briefing room floor.

“Gym,” she answered shortly. “Good luck.”

Conner swore under his breath and turned toward the gym. By unanimous agreement, the rest of the team had decided that leaving La’gaan behind on missions for the foreseeable future would be the best course of action, considering how volatile he’d been, but the decision hadn’t sat well with him at all. Ordinarily, the acting team leader would have put him on suspension until Black Canary could sign off on him, but Dick had been insistent that they handle this “in house”. Which, of course, meant that Conner would be the one doing the talking.

Apparently, the universe didn’t hate him as much as he thought it did, because La’gaan was sitting against one wall, breathing hard like he’d exhausted himself before Conner even stepped in the room. He only managed a deep scowl before taking a long drink from his water bottle as Conner sat down next to him. “Doin’ okay,” Conner asked.

“How do you think,” La’gaan muttered resentfully.

Conner shrugged. “Mission was pretty low-key, in case you were wondering. You’d’ve been doing a lot of standing.”

La’gaan grumbled something under his breath, stubbornly refusing to make eye contact.

“You know why we benched you for this one, right,” Conner asked, as it occurred to him that maybe La’gaan didn’t. He wasn’t sure who’d delivered the news - could’ve been one of the freshmen, who just spat out the basics and left before La’gaan decided to start swinging. “You’ve been really erratic lately. We’re worried about you.”

“As _if_ ,” La’gaan spat, folding his arms.

“Okay,” Conner conceded. “A lot of the team’s actually afraid of you.”

He didn’t respond, but his shoulders slumped and he bowed his head.

“Look. I’m not gonna lie, I honestly wanted to tear you in half. Not only did you hurt a team member, which will _never_ be okay, but you hurt _M’gann_ , who didn’t do anything to you.”

“Oh, and it’s fine when it’s _Aqualad_ ,” La’gaan snapped.

Conner stilled. “No,” he said slowly, “it wouldn’t be.”

“Really, because you all seem eager to have him back, despite _everything_ he did.”

“He was undercover,” Conner started, and La’gaan shot to his feet.

“That’s _all_ you people can say,” he shouted. “That’s it, that’s all you can come up with to justify what he did to m-- _us!_ ”

Conner studied him silently for a moment. “Did you actually _read_ the reports,” he asked quietly.

La’gaan gave him a murderous look. “I don’t have to, I was _there_. In case you’d _forgotten._ ”

“Well, if you’d read the reports, you’d know Kaldur did everything he could, so you’d be rescued quickly.”

“He still _kidnapped_ me.”

Conner leaned back against the wall. “You’ve never been undercover, have you?”

La’gaan turned around and gave him a dry look. “You think someone who looks like _this_ has ever been asked to _blend in_?”

Conner shrugged. “Fair point, it was just a question. But take it from me, being undercover is a crash course in picking the least terrible option given to you by a series of increasingly terrible people, so they don’t _kill you_ for lying to them. People like Black Manta have to trust you a _lot_ if you want to get anything usable from them, which means a lot of making terrible choices.”

La’gaan fidgeted uncomfortably and looked everywhere else but Conner, but said nothing. Conner sighed, leaning forward and bracing his elbows on his knees. “You ever hear about the time Red Tornado almost killed the team?”

“What?”

Conner looked up to find a sloppy mess of leftover anger, confusion, and horror on La’gaan’s face. “Yeah, it happened.” He gestured to the seat next to him, and gave La’gaan a pointed look until he sat down again. “We’d been a team about six months, I think. One day, these two red robots - Red Inferno and Red Torpedo, you can look ‘em up in the database - they come storming into the Cave. Took Kaldur, M’gann, Wally, and me hostage - Nightwing, Robin then, and Artemis showed up later, and managed to evade them. Good thing, or we’d’ve _all_ been done. As it stands, we cut it _very_ close. M’gann and Kaldur almost burned to death; Wally, Robin, and me almost drowned.” He paused, inhaling slowly. “Long story short, not a good day. Well, come to find out later, Kaldur had known for _weeks_ that there was a traitor on the team. Didn’t tell anyone besides Red Arrow.”

“He _what_?”

Conner cracked a small smile. “That’s about what our reaction was, too. He thought that, if there was a mole, he didn’t want to tip them off before he’d finished gathering intel, and if there _wasn’t_ , he didn’t want to do damage to the team dynamic with false accusations.” Conner chuckled humorlessly. “We all had a hard enough time trusting each other on our own - some imaginary witch-hunt wasn’t going to make working together any easier. So he chose not to tell us, we found out after Red Tornado and his crazy siblings almost killed us, and reacted exactly as poorly as expected.”

La’gaan folded his arms. “He still should’ve told the team, given them a chance to speak for themselves.”

“We only had half the story,” Conner said, shaking his head. “As soon as we heard that there was information he didn’t trust us with, we _all_ lost it. I mean, people almost got themselves _killed_ because of how they reacted.” He leaned his head back against the wall, studying the ceiling of the gym. “The part we didn’t stick around for, before we all lost it and took it out on Kaldur, was that the intel had come from Sportsmaster. Turns out, the Reds attacking had nothing to do with the mole - T.O. Morrow had sent them to get Red Tornado back from the League, and he just happened to be our, well, den mother. Yeah, the Den Mother Years were before your time. But ultimately, Kaldur was right to have kept it from us.”

Next to him, La’gaan sat back, arms folded. “Is there a point to this?”

Conner rolled his shoulders, choosing his words carefully. “Kaldur made a call, as leader, not to tell us about the traitor. In hindsight, it was the least terrible option, in a bunch of _really_ terrible options. Did people get hurt? Yeah. Would people have gotten hurt if he’d chosen differently? Probably. Did we all have trust issues for a while? Of course we did.” Conner sighed. “Listen, I get where you’re coming from, La’gaan. Kaldur made a call in the line of duty that hurt people, that hurt _you_ , and you want him called on it. I understand, I’ve been there. But that _does not_ excuse this kind of a response. You don’t have to trust him, you don’t have to like him. But you _do_ need to suck it up, get your head out of your ass, and quit lashing out at everyone who does.”

Much of the tension in La’gaan’s posture had bled out, but he still looked troubled. “So I’m getting replaced by a traitor. _Great_ ,” he muttered.

“Whoa, wait. Hold on. Who said anything about _replacing_ you?”

La’gaan fidgeted, ducking his head. It was easy, with his bravado and posturing and strength in the field, that La’gaan really _was_ only a freshman himself. “I just thought,” he started, and shook his head, unable to continue.

“Shit,” Conner sighed, leaning his head back again. “We don’t have a quota on Atlanteans, you know that, right? You’re a valuable member of the team, and Kaldur coming back - _if_ he comes back, we still don’t know how that’s going to play out - him coming back isn’t going to change where _you_ stand with us. Unless you keep it up with this ‘Let’s kick the shit out of teammates’ thing you’ve been doing lately. _That_ will get you kicked out.”

After a second of tense silence, La’gaan slumped into the wall. “I apologize,” he muttered. At least he sounded marginally less resentful. That was something.

“Don’t apologize to me,” Conner said, hauling himself to his feet. “Apologize to M’gann, and the rest of the team.” He turned and gave La’gaan a sympathetic look. “You feel better now?” La’gaan didn’t say anything, too busy staring pensively at his feet. Conner sighed. “Do yourself a favor, and take a day and just read the mission reports. Straight through, no skimming. I know it helped me figure things out.” La’gaan still said nothing. Conner nodded awkwardly, part _There, my job is done_ and part _Well, I guess I’ll be on my way then_ , and headed for the door.


	16. Chapter 16

To be fair, the text message warning him that Dinah was on her way - with takeout, apparently - had been sent a half hour ago, but his cell phone had been in the kitchen while he’d been putting Lian to bed, and by the time he saw the message, it had been twenty three minutes and she had already followed up to say she was almost to his building. “Crap,” Roy muttered, struck by a sudden, irrational desire to speed-clean his apartment.

By the time she knocked on his door, he’d at least managed to pick up in the living room and get through most of the dirty dishes loitering in his sink. He grabbed a towel off the handle of the stove and dried his hands as he went to open the door, padding barefoot across the threadbare carpet.

True to her word, Dinah stood bearing a paper bag laden with Indian food – enough to leave plenty of leftovers in his fridge, which was likely just a subtle way of reassuring herself he was eating, especially after his disastrously self-destructive behavior while he'd been looking for Speedy. He winced as he took the bag and let her into the apartment. He was probably lucky she trusted him enough to let him keep Lian without suing for custody herself.

“Hey kiddo,” she said as she removed her shoes by the door. “Oh-- Sorry, I really should stop calling you that. It's just habit.”

Roy smiled. “Honestly, I'd be worried if you didn't. Not that I’m not happy to see you, but what's the occasion? The last time someone dropped by here unannounced on a weeknight, I found out that my b-- that Kaldur was dying. My latent trust issues are going crazy.”

Dinah gave him a knowing look and moved into the kitchen to get two plates off the drying rack. “I haven't had a chance to really touch base with you in a while,” she said, fishing forks out of the silverware drawer. “Hal wanted to swap monitor shifts for this week, so I had the evening free. Thought I'd come bother you.”

The bag rustled loudly as Roy set about pulling out styrofoam containers. “Is this a mom visit, or a therapist house call,” he asked wryly, accepting a plate and a fork from Dinah as he folded the bag and leaned over to set it on the counter.

“Can it be both,” Dinah quipped back, sliding her jacket off and draping it over the back of her chair. “I got the play-by-play of the strategy meeting from Dick.”

“ _ Please  _ tell me  _ he's  _ back on his therapy schedule,” Roy interrupted, scooping a generous helping of rice onto his plate.

“In flagrant violation of doctor-patient confidentiality,” Dinah said archly, “yes, I can tell you that he is. It's a recent development. Enforcement of said schedule is another issue entirely, but we're getting off the subject. I wanted to talk about you. I heard you got volunteered to have a house guest.”

“ I did not get  _ volunteered, _ ”  Roy said, rolling his eyes. “God, you make it sound like he's some burden the League dropped on me. He’s always welcome.”

“Is he,” Dinah asked innocently. Roy's shoulders fell – that was definitely her Therapist Voice. Crap.

“Of course,” he said firmly. “Why wouldn't he be?”

Dinah gave him a flat look. “Roy, don't try to downplay what you and Kaldur were to each other just because you think the situation needs you to. It's not healthy and you know it.”

“We weren't—”

“ _ Roy _ .”

In a bid to stall for time, Roy shoveled a large forkful into his mouth and chewed as slowly as possible, avoiding Dinah's gaze as he thought his words through. He swallowed carefully and spun his fork in a lazy twirl on his plate. “I don't know what we were,” he admitted wearily. “I mean, we sort of just...fell off the map, for each other. I got sucked into hunting for Speedy – yeah, I know, don't say it – and then by the time I came up for air, Kaldur had already joined Black Manta. It wasn't like we had some great big falling out and now it's this open wound for both of us.” He sighed. “I don't know, maybe we just outgrew each other. It happens sometimes.”

Dinah gave him a look. “You don't really believe that, do you?”

Frustrated, Roy stood up from the table and headed for the fridge. “What else is there?” He grabbed a beer out of the door and held it up around the door. “You want one?”

“Sure,” Dinah said, and he grabbed another and the churchkey fridge magnet before coming back to the table. She waited until he'd opened his beer before covering his hand with hers. “I'll be straight with you here, Roy,” she said gently. “I am really not interested in pushing you into one of those nights that ends up being just us painting our nails and bitching about break-ups. I'm good for it if you need it, but I'm going to let you make that choice.”

“Unusually considerate of you,” Roy muttered into his beer, taking a sip with a smile as Dinah gave him a withering look.

“ Right now,” she continued pointedly, “I'm more interested in the soon-to-be immediate reality. Be  _ honest  _ with me, is having Kaldur living with you going to cause problems? I've made it a point to back off recently, and from what I can see, you've been doing very well, but I don't want this to be the thing that brings all of your work to get back on your feet crashing down, all because you feel like if you don't take him, he won't have anywhere to go. I'd be happy to host him, don’t feel like you’re the only option here.”

Roy bit his lip, considering. “It won't cause problems for me,” he said carefully. “Miss Martian was going to bring the plan up with Kaldur and see what he thought, but I don't know if he'll object. If he does...would you be willing to take him?”

Dinah took a small bite and studied him for a minute. “Do you think he might have a reason to object?”

“I don’t know,” Roy muttered, sounding oddly defensive even to his own ears. “I can’t think of any one thing that might have happened, but you never know.”

She nodded slowly, still looking at him like a biologist studying an unfamiliar species. “Would you want to get back together with him, if you could?”

Roy did an admirable job of not flinching. “We were never--”

“Oh, don't start that shit with me, Roy.”

Chastened, he settled back in his seat, picking idly at his food. “I think that ship sailed a long time ago.”

“But if you could,” Dinah pressed.

Roy gave a sullen shrug and reached for his beer again. “I still care about him, if that's what you're driving at,” he said irritably. “Am I going to start hitting on him when he's here? No, absolutely not. I'm worried about where he's at now and I still--” He exhaled forcefully. “I still love him, okay? That's not going to change, even if he doesn't love me back.”

Dinah favored him with a proud smile. “That's not a bad thing, Roy. Quite the opposite, actually. Kaldur is going to need all the people who love him that he can get, going forward.”

“If La'gaan gets gets within fifty feet of him, I'm gonna shoot him in the dick.”

Dinah laughed softly, indulgently. “Alright,” she soothed, “let's not go that far. I think Conner had a chat with him, so he might be coming around.”

Roy gave her a skeptical look as he chewed, and she raised a hand as if to say  _ I know, but humor me _ .

“So,” Dinah said, changing the subject, “where's Kaldur going to live in this shoebox of yours?”

“Probably going to end up setting him up in my room and taking the couch, honestly. I don't want him to feel like he's living in the common areas, and he really shouldn't be sleeping on my shitty couch if he's still recovering.”

“Not ideal, but it would work in the short term,” Dinah said evenly. “I mean, I agree with the consensus at the meeting – you two always were close, and I think that familiarity will be important to him.”

Roy fussed with the label on his beer, picking at one corner. “I hope so,” he muttered, trying not to think of how much both of them had probably changed, and the slim odds of being able to pick up where they left off.

 

* * *

Artemis finished pouring her cup of coffee and turned, bracing her hips against the edge of the counter. “Can I help you with something, or are you just gonna stand there staring all day?”

La’gaan flinched, just a little, not enough to notice if she hadn’t been trained to look for that kind of weakness. “I...wondered if we could talk,” he said awkwardly, shifting from one foot to another. Artemis raised an eyebrow at him and took a slow sip from her coffee cup. “About Kaldur,” he clarified, and she lowered the mug.

“Ah.” Pushing off the counter, she made her way to the long, curving couch that sat at one end of the Watchtower common room. Hesitantly, La’gaan followed, perching on the edge somewhere around the middle. Artemis took a seat a couple feet away, just to be safe, and pulled her feet up under her bent knees, angling herself toward him. “So.”

Fidgeting nervously, La’gaan kept staring at the floor. “I...was angry with Kaldur.”

Artemis snorted and lifted her mug from where it was perched on her knee. “No shit,” she muttered.

“Conner explained some things,” La’gaan continued, either ignoring her or not having heard her at all, “and I see now, that I was...”

“ Wrong? Overreacting? Letting personal prejudices run away with you?” Artemis softened the jab with a smile when La’gaan tensed. “It’s cool, if we all had a nickel for every time we’ve done it. Spoilers, we’re  _ all  _ actually terrible. Welcome to the club.”

La’gaan leaned forward to brace his elbows on his knees. “He told me about...when Red Tornado went rogue. Conner did, I mean.”

Artemis cocked her head. “Wow, you hadn’t heard that one before?  _ Not  _ our finest hour, let me tell you. Did Conner have a point in telling you that, or was he just trying to get you to calm down?”

“ Maybe both,” La’gaan suggested unhappily. “I think his  _ point  _ was that command is difficult, and I need to find my way to forgiveness or risk getting benched permanently.”

“Fair, in context,” Artemis allowed. “But I’m guessing he also suggested you go read the mission report for yourself, didn’t he?”

La’gaan paused, and muttered, “Yes, he did.”

“ Which,” she continued, “leads me to believe that his point was  _ actually  _ that you’re operating under some pretty big misconceptions and you’d probably feel differently if you actually knew what you were talking about. Did you read the mission report?” When La’gaan didn’t reply, Artemis took a knowing sip of her coffee. “Mmhm. Then you should probably go  _ do  _ that.”

La’gaan sighed and sat up abruptly. “You were with him,” he said, and his tone could very easily have been read as accusing. “Why take  _ me _ ? Why give me over to the Reach?”

Artemis raised an eyebrow at him. “Because the alternative was let his men  _ kill you _ . Believe me, he wasn’t happy about it, but it was the only way to keep you alive, keep  _ our  _ cover,  _ and  _ it gave the team an excuse to raid the ship once we passed them the intel with your tracking data.”

“The least terrible option,” La’gaan muttered pensively.

“ Yeah, more or less,” Artemis agreed. “You know one of the first things he wanted to know after M’gann got his mind put back together was if you were okay, if the team had gotten you out safely. He was  _ worried  _ for you. He never wanted you to get hurt.”

La’gaan didn’t say anything, just kept fussing with his hands.

Artemis sighed. “Look. If you don’t wanna work with the guy, great. Awesome. Tell Nightwing or Batgirl or whoever the fuck is in charge of this circus that you want to be assigned to separate teams. Team’s big enough that they’ll probably accommodate that. He might not even be coming back. If you really hate him that much, I guarantee you that not only will Kaldur understand, he’ll probably agree with you.”

“I don’t-- I don’t hate him,” La’gaan argued.

“Really,” Artemis said flatly. “You’ve got a weird way of showing it.”

La’gaan ducked his head. “I should go read the mission report,” he said quietly.

“Probably a good plan.”

He paused, brow furrowing. “He...said something to me, before I was handed over to the Reach.”

Artemis looked at him expectantly and took a sip from her mug.

“He said... Something like, ‘I know my role in the larger picture, do you?’ What did he mean by that?”

“Who knows,” Artemis shrugged. “Kal can do cryptic with the best of ‘em. You might have to suck it up and ask him.” La’gaan winced, and Artemis couldn’t resist the temptation to add, “Of course, that would also probably involve apologizing to him, so your choice, I guess.”

“Do you... Do you think I’ll be kicked off the team, regardless of whether or not I apologize? I mean, with Kaldur coming back--”

Artemis gave a stunned little laugh and stood up. “Oh, man, do not even get me  _ started  _ on ‘team quotas’, you don’t even wanna go down that road.” She took another swig of her coffee and leaned down to get in his face. “And La’gaan? Don’t think because we had this heart-to-heart that I’m gonna go to bat for you if you pull this shit again. You’ve still got debts to pay, and if I hear about your temper getting the better of you around a teammate,  _ Aqualad’s personal ninja cow  _ is going to break  _ both  _ of your legs this time. Clear?”

La’gaan swallowed hard. “You heard about that?”

She smiled and straightened up. “I did hear about that. And it’ll be a long time before I forget it.”

 


	17. Chapter 17

Garth swam back and forth outside Sha’lain’a’s house, watching as the shadows bled up from the ocean floor and lights winked out one by one in Shayeris. Inside, Miss Martian and Queen Mera were preparing Kaldur to make the journey to the surface. King Orin had been called away on League business - ironic, since the League was the reason they were undertaking this journey. Kaldur was still weak, able to walk for short periods but no longer than from one room to another without needing to sit and rest, but tensions in Atlantis had ratcheted up again with another call a few days earlier for increased efforts in apprehending Kaldur and the rest of Black Manta’s organization. Whatever preparations there had been left to make had been rushed, and even though they all were uncertain about Kaldur’s ability to make the journey, they all had agreed that they had no choice.

Someone drifted out of the house behind him, and Garth turned to see Sha’lain’a coming toward him. “Almost,” she told quietly, giving him a small smile. “Are you ready?”

“Ready for this to be over,” Garth muttered wearily. “How is he?”

She bit her lip anxiously, looking back toward the house. “Still weak. But,” she sighed, turning back toward Shayeris, “I agree. It is time. He is only in danger here.”

Garth folded his arms. “No matter how much time passes, admitting Kaldur is safer on the surface never gets any easier.”

“Agreed,” Sha’lain’a muttered. Garth studied her for a second, opened his mouth, and hesitated.

“You have my word, he will reach the surface alive and safe,” he told her solemnly.

Sha’lain’a gave him a tired smile and reached out for his hand. “Thank you, but please, not at your own expense. His life is not worth more to me than yours, and you know Kaldur as well as I - he would never forgive himself.”

Garth sighed. “Then it would seem we have that in common.”

She folded him in a hug and pressed her lips to his temple. “Just be careful,” she murmured. “Promise me that.”

Something moved out of the corner of Garth’s eye, and he didn’t answer in favor of drifting away from Sha’lain’a and looking toward the door. Miss Martian hovered in the doorway, clutching her hands nervously in front of her waist. “We’re almost ready,” she said quietly, casting a quick glance at Sha’lain’a.

Garth nodded, squaring his shoulders. Sha’lain’a crossed the few feet between her and Miss Martian and embraced her, pulling her forehead into the crook of her neck. “Thank you for taking care of my boy,” Garth heard her murmur into Miss Martian’s cloud of red hair.

“Of course,” Miss Martian said, moving back to arm’s length. “We’ll send updates as we can. Thank you for hosting me.”

Sha’lain’a opened her mouth to reply and stopped short when Queen Mera came into the entryway, one arm wrapped around Kaldur’s back to steady him. “Are we ready,” she asked.

Kaldur edged away from Mera’s supporting hand toward his mother. Carefully, he folded his arms around her shoulders and buried his face in her neck. Sha’lain’a returned the embrace as tightly as she dared, cradling the back of his head in one hand. “My son,” she whispered, pressing her cheek to his temple. “Be safe, regain your strength. Perhaps one day you’ll come back to me, but for now know that I am so _endlessly_ proud of you.” Kaldur only hugged her tighter, his shoulders tense and full of need, storing up all he could of the moment before he said his goodbyes.

“I love you,” he managed after a long, silent minute, with his three escorts watching on in varying degrees of sad awkwardness. He lifted his head, opening his mouth like there was something else he wanted to say, but after a few seconds, he closed his mouth and settled for pressing a kiss to his mother’s cheek. “Be careful.”

“You worry about yourself,” Sha’lain’a chided gently, giving him a gentle nudge back toward Queen Mera. “You should get moving.”

The group shared an awkward few seconds of silence as everyone searched for an adequate farewell. At last, Mera guided Kaldur past Garth and Miss Martian, toward the darkened streets of Shayeris. “Be safe,” Sha’lain’a cautioned behind them again, and Garth nodded as he followed his travelling companions away from the house.

Every few yards, he glanced back at the house, expecting to see the doorway empty and the windows dark. But Sha’lain’a remained, watching them until they were far out of sight. Garth felt his heart twist at the thought, and swam after the three ahead of him - _are we really doing the right thing?_

* * *

Mera guided Kaldur out of the current, following Miss Martian through the shallower waters close to the Maryland coast. Garth trailed behind them, keeping watch for any pursuers from Atlantis. “How much farther,” she called ahead.

“Not far,” Miss Martian assured her, twisting and swimming backwards to look at Mera as she held up a small waterproof GPS unit. “How are you doing, Kaldur? Should we stop again?”

Kaldur shook his head. He was pale and exhausted, but less so than Mera had anticipated, after the aid of the currents in sweeping them the majority of their journey. “I am fine,” he called, and Miss Martian frowned.

“We can stop,” she argued gently. “We’ve made good time so far. Garth, anything?”

He swam up behind Mera and shook his head at Miss Martian over Kaldur’s shoulder. “Everything seems quiet behind us. We could probably rest for a minute.”

The party slowed, but Kaldur kept pressing forward. “I would prefer not to keep those who have gathered to meet us waiting,” he said, and Miss Martian rolled her eyes.

“It’s not like they’re going to get tired of waiting and leave, Kaldur. We have time, and you’re still healing. We’ll rest for a few minutes and then keep going.”

Kaldur fidgeted uncomfortably, but did as instructed. “Perhaps we should have elected you to lead the team instead of Nightwing,” he joked weakly.

Miss Martian laughed, settling down beside him while Mera and Garth stood guard over them. “Oh, no. Besides, leadership has really passed to Batgirl recently. She’s done an excellent job. I could never have done so well. I’m just not cut out for it.”

“Few are,” Kaldur sighed. He rubbed a hand over his eyes and took a few gentle, deep breaths. Miss Martian took his hand carefully.

“How are you feeling, _really_ ,” she pressed quietly, leaning in close.

He exhaled again and listed sideways to lean against her shoulder. “It has been a long journey,” he admitted simply, and volunteered nothing more.

Garth and Mera shared a look over their heads - true, it had been nearly two hours since they left Shayeris, but the currents had done most of the work in ferrying them this far. No one had any illusions that Kaldur was close to full recovery, but perhaps he was less prepared than they had thought. What if they were doing more harm than good in making the trek so soon?

The group lapsed into silence, until Kaldur rolled his shoulders and reached for Mera’s outstretched hand to pull himself up. Wordlessly, Miss Martian took up the lead again, Mera slid an arm around Kaldur’s back again, and Garth resumed his post behind them. They swam in silence, accompanied only by the pull of the tides and Kaldur’s steadily more labored breathing as they approached the shoreline. Miss Martian glanced back at him with increasing frequency, obviously trying not to resist the temptation to quicken her pace and strain Kaldur with keeping up. Garth followed closely, ready to catch Kaldur at any moment should the last of his strength leave him.

They made it up into the waves, and trudged through the water toward the beach. Garth came around Kaldur’s other side and ducked under his arm, half-carrying him onto damp sand. Miss Martian waved to a pair of cars parked away from the water, and a group of distant figures seated in and standing around the open back of a Subaru waved back and started down toward them.

Garth and Mera helped Kaldur trudge up the sand toward the welcoming party, his head drooping and his breathing labored. “Just a little bit farther,” Mera encouraged gently as Miss Martian ran to throw her arms around Superboy’s neck in greeting. “We’re nearly there.”

Stubborn to the end, Kaldur dropped his arms from Mera and Garth’s support to meet his teammates on his own. He took one unsteady step, then two, then three. On the fourth step, his knees buckled under him and he went pitching toward the sand, too weak to catch himself.

Instead of meeting cold, damp sand, his face pressed against soft, warm fabric. Solid arms wrapped around his shoulders. Disoriented, Kaldur twisted, half-heartedly trying to get his bearings again as his vision blurred.

Above him, Roy smiled. “Hey,” he said softly, and Kaldur lost the fight to stay awake.


End file.
